Report from the frontline

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

Wow, that was the week that was. As I write this I have just about recovered from a 3 day intensive immersion in the whole area of online marketing performance measurement and optimisation. I think we used to call it web analytics. Now I’m back in my own time zone I’m beginning to process some of what I saw and learnt at the Emetrics Summit in Washington a couple of weeks ago.

Before I went I was already picking up the vibes that it was going to be bigger and broader than anything I had been to before and that certainly proved the case. I think that there were over 600 people there over the course of the conference. OK, that may not be huge compared to some of the other US internet conferences you might attend but for the ugly duckling of online marketing I think it shows just how far the web analytics industry has come.

One of the challenges at these conferences now is deciding what to see. I probably spent as much time looking at the programme, trying to work out which session to see as I did wondering round the hotel trying to find the actual session. At various times during the conference there were six tracks running simultaneously ranging from topics such as behavioural targeting and testing through to public sector success, from search analytics to email metrics and from web 2.0 measurement to statistical analysis. A very eclectic mix of subject matter!

As I suspected, this industry is not only growing but diversifying. Some of the more interesting conversations I had over in DC were not with web analytics vendors talking about the latest features of their particular software but were with smaller companies tackling a particular problem in a different way. For example, new approaches to gathering and analysing customer feedback data through text mining or a methodology for media planning optimisation using predictive analytics.

Time and space doesn’t allow me to give a blow by blow account of what I saw and learnt at this conference and it’s already been documented in other columns and blogs. What I wanted to do is just share some of the key things I took out from the event. So for me, here are some of my highlights:

• Jim Sterne’s key note speech. I’ve heard Jim speak many times and I’m always impressed. This time round he challenged us to ‘think differently’. Getting us to ‘think’ full stop I think is often enough of a challenge but Jim’s presentation also reminded me that as an analyst you can’t realise strategic value unless you also deliver tactical benefit.
• Ronny Kohavi from Microsoft’s presentation on controlled experiments on the web. Everyone’s getting excited about multi-variate testing but Ronny showed what immense benefit you can get from running simple tests on a continuous basis. Also when evaluating those tests don’t look just at the short term gain but also look to understand the longer term value that you will gain
• Meeting a bunch of people for the first time. You read people’s blogs, you see their posts on the email groups but there’s no substitute for meeting them in flesh and discussing their ideas face to face.

So what next? As you read this I’m probably on my way back from the first Emetrics Summit in Sweden. This is continued sign of the growth and development of this industry, in particular outside of the US. Sure, the size and scope will be different to what I experienced in Washington DC but I expect the enthusiasm, inertest and lobby bar conversations to be very similar!