Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) Kick-off @ Amsterdam

Last week, Aurélie and I were invited for the kick-off of the Web Analytics Wednesdays in Amsterdam. As Brussels and Amsterdam is only 200km next from each other, and we are addicted to ‘de enige echte Hollandse drop’, we didn’t hesitate long to jump in our car.

Before I go into detail about the event in Amsterdam, for those who haven’t a clue what Web Analytic Wednesdays are all about (I assume 90% of the readers of this blog already attended at least 1 WAW), here are some facts (see also Web Analytics Wednesday F.A.Q.):

• Definition: Web Analytics Wednesday is the world’s only distributed networking event for web analytics professionals. Open to everyone, practitioners and vendors alike, Web Analytics Wednesday is a free event allowing you to meet folks with similar work interests.
• Founded by Eric T. Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demystified and Web Site Measurement Hacks
• Topics: Ideally you’d discuss web analytic topics like favorite vendors, how your company uses web analytics and staffing issues but everyone eventually tires of talking about work. Get to know people! Especially within this community I’m sure you’ll discover you have friends in common, have worked at the same places, etc. Whatever you discuss, have fun!
• Calendar: Either visit the main Web Analytics Wednesday page at Web Analytics Demystified to see which events are scheduled for the coming month or, even better, subscribe to the RSS feed for Web Analytics Wednesday events.
• Drinks: the first round is on WAA 🙂

Back to Amsterdam. The initiative for the first Dutch WAW was taken by Frans Appels from Netprofiler, and Nicole Niemann from Satama Interactive, and took place in the nice open kitchen of the Satama offices.
About 60 people subscribed for this event which is already a great succes, and shows that Web Analytics really lives in the Netherlands (and I can confirm also in the rest of the Benelux). Amongst the attendees there were some vendors (Nedstat was well represented with 4 – Moniforce – WSS), a lot of agencies and consultants (WA but also SEM), but also some end-users which are working with a WA tool since quite a while such as Vodafone, ING, PostcodeLotterij…

After a brief introduction of all (yes all) attendees, Frans Appels and Steve Jackson (WA expert and president of the WAA Nordic) explained a bit more about the WAA and went briefly deeper into KPI definition. The info was quite general because there was no time to go into detail, and that wasn’t the goal neither for this kick-off.

The rest of this first WAW meeting ended more in an open discussion regarding the topics and format of future WAWs in the Netherlands. What Aurélie and myself agreed upon, and how we would like to do it in Brussels :

• Each WAW should cover a specific market (press, financial, travel,…) or topic
• At least 1 case should be presented by an end-user
• Vendors should have the possibility to show their product but this shouldn’t take more than 10% of the total event time or 1 WAW should be dedicated to the vendors, including a panel discussion between them
• People attending should be WA agencies, consultants, vendors, end-users with some experience. The goal is not to create an event where prospects do their WA tool selection. There are plenty of other events where this is possible.

We can conclude that Web Analytics is very much alive in the Netherlands, and that with a good structure and a focused content the Web Analytics Wednesdays definitely have a future for our northern neighbours. We will follow it closely, and hope we will be invited for the events to come. Even if it was just to buy some more stock of the one and only ‘echte Hollandse drop’.

We are thus organising a Web Analytics Wednesday the 11th of April.  Should you want to attend the next WAW in Brussels, please register at Eric’s Website. We will inform you asap about the location and the selected topic for the event in this Blog.

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