Report from Emetrics DC 2008
This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
As I write this, the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in Washington DC is drawing to a close and I am trying to process all the inputs and turn them into some outputs of the core themes and takeaways. Tough job, there’s been a lot of stuff to process.
One of the key messages that I picked up from a number of the sessions I attended was that people had moved on talking about the “what” to the “how”. So the talks focussed less on “What is web analytics?”, “What is optimisation?”, “What is multi-variate testing?” and more on “How do I embed web analytics into the organisation?”, “How do I create a testing culture?, “How do we move towards a performance driven organisation”. It’s like we know what the tools in the toolbox are now; we just need to figure out how to use them better and to get other people in the organisation on board. There were still some presentations that covered the “what” type questions but they seemed to mostly revolve around the newer technologies and the emerging measurement practices such as social media and mobile analytics.
A parallel theme that came through was the sense that some organisations or people within these organisations were hitting a glass ceiling. They had deployed the tools, generating the data, created the reports but were struggling to take it to the next level. They could see the opportunity but were not able to make the break through. Bill Gasman from Gartner outlined a number of requirements to move an organisation’s analytics capability forward and the first one of these was to have senior “C” level sponsorship. I’ve just finished reading Tom Davenport’s book “Competing on Analytics” and time and time again he also makes the point that companies that successfully deploy an enterprise wide approach to analytics usually have someone at the top making it happen. The question then becomes how you go about getting that support? I described one approach that worked for me in my last article. (www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3631145) and that seemed to be a view endorsed by Bill Gassman when asked the same question by someone in the audience. His answer was to start small and build momentum. It was interesting to observe that some of the issues we are encountering in Europe are not all that different to some of the issues being raised here in the US.
One of the highlights for me was watching Avinash Kaushik unveil the latest enhancements to Google Analytics. You sensed it was what the crowd had been waiting for. It’s not often you see a vendor being applauded for announcing feature releases. Of the various developments announced there were two that caught my attention. The first one is the new advanced segmentation feature. I’m a big fan of the ability to filter and segment your data and so any developments in this area are welcome. Providing a segmentation capability in a tool like Google Analytics will encourage property owners to look beyond the topline numbers and to start to think about their site in terms of different groups of visitors behaving in different ways. So hopefully people will start to look beyond teh bland averages of topline reports and start to drill down into their data.
The other feature that caught my eye was the announcement of a Google Analytics API to allow access to the underlying data. Details are still a bit sketchy at the moment but for me one of the features of a more enterprise level tool is the data integration capabilities. There are many hacks out there for getting data out of Google Analytics and hopefully the API will make this easier in the future. This seems to be recognition by Google that web analytics data can’t operate in a silo if it is to survive.
Finally the presentation of the conference for me was by Jason Carmel from ZAAZ. Jason’s presentation went by the title of “Effectively using kittens for optimisation and usability” (Go figure!) and in it he looked at how site optimisation using tools such as Optimost and Google Website Optimiser is complementary to user-centric design processes and usability based optimisation. He outlined the process by which the two can work together in site optimisation projects with the site optimisation tools basically telling you what’s working and the usability analysis showing you why it’s working and how to use usability experts to improve the quality of the site optimisation tests. It reinforced to me that you always will need more than one tool, in the toolbox to get the job done properly.