Emetrics: The Big Picture – report from Day 1

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

Well, Emetrics: The Big Picture is in full swing here in Washington DC. Around 450 delegates have come to network and listen to about 50 speakers across 7 different tracks. Here are some of my “take outs” and thoughts from the first day.

Jim Sterne kicked off the proceedings with a vintage Jim style presentation. Although I have seen Jim present on many occasions I always end up thinking about something new each time. This time it was the reinforcement that you need to have clear goals before you can make any of this stuff happen. Sounds obvious, but it’s so true. “Think in terms of verbs” he said, meaning that a site has got to have purpose and once you can articulate the purpose, then everything else becomes easy or at least easier.

There’s quite a lot of talk about testing and multivariate testing in particular. A number of presentations I have seen extol the virtues of multivariate testing and the significant gains in conversions that can be made, whether that be sales, downloads or whatever the conversion event happens to be. Multivariate testing is something that has really taken off here in the US and I have no doubt that it will gain traction in the UK and Europe in due course. To make the most of testing programmes you have to have a solid platform of measurement in place and that’s something a number of companies are in the UK are focussing on at the moment.

There is still probably though an open question about the level of investment required in resources and money to run a successful testing programme in the UK. The US market has the advantage of scale and it’s able to generate the return on investment in testing. There are relatively few organisations in Europe where changes in conversion rates are likely to generate millions of pounds of extra business.

I headed over to the public sector track here ass well to take in some of the thinking about measuring the effectiveness of no-for-profit websites. Being based in Washington there’s a large public sector presence here at the conference. In one presentation by a speaker from the Library of Congress, I was struck by the fact that relatively few of their KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) came from their web analytics tool. The majority came from survey data or internal data sources. This probably reinforces one of the challenges of getting really string strategic measures from web analytics tools when there are few or no obvious conversion points.

I also took in a couple of sessions looking at the use of advanced analytics in optimising acquisition marketing. Once again multivariate testing was talked about but this time in the context of creative optimisation rather than site optimisation. One of the things that came through from these presentations was the need to have an analytical process that clearly identifies what the business goals are. This is something we firmly believe in and something that we recently blogged about. I liked a statement from the presenter from ask.com who said that “the goal needs to be simple; the result needs to be simple”. Again I couldn’t agree more.

A moment of lighyt releief came from a mix up between two speakers on the audio equipment. One speaker gave his whole presentation talking into the handsfree earpiece of the previous speaker’s Blackberry, thinking it was the wireless microphone set up. No one noticed at the time and the mistake was only realised at the end when the first speaker was looking for their phone.

Anyway, more from day 2 of the conference tomorrow?