Emetrics – optimising analytics

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/10/09 and is republished here with permission.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks on the conference circuit. WebTrends held their Engage conference in London and last week I was in Washington DC for the Emetrics Marking Optimization Summit . It was good to see WebTrends out and about in the market, showing off some of their latest stuff. They’ve been working hard on their messaging by the looks of it and getting a distinctive market positioning going. The core brand themes they talked about were “Power”, “Elegance” and “Openness”. By “Elegance” they were referring to the usability of the solution for the end user and it was interesting for someone who works at a user experience consultancy that they have built an in-house user experience team on ensuring that they have the right focus on making the data as accessible and digestible as possible. Information visualisation is definitely on the agenda at the moment. By “Openness” they are talking about the ability to get data in and out of the application via APIs. As someone who thinks that web data should be “liberated” and not locked into reporting tools, this is an approach I approve of.

Emetrics was the usual three days of input, stimulation and networking. Jim Sterne kicked off proceedings by challenging us to focus on turning web intelligence into business value and there were some great examples of how’s that being done in some of the presentations I went to. One of them was from Joe Megibow, VP, Global Analytics and Optimisation at Expedia. Megibow took us through some of the initiatives and changes that had been happening in analytics at Expedia over the past 6 months following a global re-organisation of the business. Some of the work they are doing to tackle marketing attribution problems was interesting, but what was more interesting to me were some of his thoughts about how to get analytics and optimisation initiatives higher up the food chain at organisations. Some of his advice included the need “to construct meaningful narratives”, i.e. the need to add insight and interpretation rather than just hand over the numbers. That resonated with me as I’m always asking my analysts to “tell a story” rather than just present a bunch of charts. Other useful bits of advice from Megibow were to “do less but accomplish more” and to “start small and communicate”. It’s clear to me that he’s focused on delivering business value and he said in response to a question that at the moment he wouldn’t grow his team because the business wouldn’t be able to necessarily get more things done from the insights they generated. Therefore the return on investment from the additional hires would be zero. At the end of the day, the return on investment from analytics is dependent on an organisation’s ability to execute on the findings.

A continuing impression I got from the conference was that measurement of some of the newer digital channels is still hard to do. When it comes to the measurement of mobile, audio, video, social media and so on, people are figuring out as they go along. So it was good to see some of the various approaches that companies were taking to the measurement of these various channels. What struck me also was that there are an increasing number of possible tools that can be used, particular in the social media monitoring and measurement space. But whatever, the technology the key thing is to have a process and that came through loud and clear in a couple of the sessions that I went to on social media measurement. A bit like the dotcom days 10 years ago, it’s tempting for companies to jump on the latest bandwagon without being clear about what their objectives are and what they want to get out of it. So planning is key and the measurement approach follows from that.

Sterne wrapped up the conference with a quick digest of the things that he had learned from the previous US conference back in May in San Jose. He went through the highlights of the “Analysis Symposium” that lead to his report on “101 things that you should know about analysis” . He summarised it as follows: “When doing analysis you should make it:

• About people
• Actionable
• Not about you
• Prioritised
• Intriguing
• Pre-determined
• Compelling (rather than precise)
• Palatable
• Relevant (to the individual)
• A treasure hunt

And finally you should make it happen. I don’t think you can say fairer that that.