Yes indeed. I came to this “web analytics” thing about two years ago and have attended every eMetrics Conference since then. In each conference, I learn a lot, get to know many fine people in our field and come back with a bunch of ideas that I can implement at Dell. Each conference also marks a step forward in my personal growth. I shall say, without eMetrics Summit, I won’t be where I am today.

Let me reflect the journey…

Oct. 2008 in Washington DC. My first eMetrics Experience. I was shocked, overwhelmed, impressed and inspired. As a result of this conference, I decided this is what I want to focus for the rest of my life, as long as I am working. Here are the thoughts I wrote down at that time. eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 1), eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 2), eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 3) and Key Takeaways from eMetrics Summit 2008 in DC

May. 2009 in San Jose. I probably wouldn’t go to this conference if I wasn’t elected to the Board of Director of Web Analytics Association. Swine Flu was scary at that time. See my little story Here I am San Jose!

Oct. 2009 in Washington DC. In this conference, instead of just participating, I co-presented with my former manager, Gautam Madiman, now Director at AutoDesk, a topic many audience found interesting “Dell’s Evolution – Leveraging Analytics Globally as a Key Strategic Business Driver” I was also brave enough to take the WAA Certification “test the test” and was the second in place among 50 also participants. In this conference, I started the tradition to bring a Dell Adamo laptop as a give away prize.

May. 2010 in San Jose. In this conference, I was invited to the “Global Enterprise Management Panel” and sit down with Keith Boswell from Kaiser Permanente and Kim Stegner from IBM. To some extents, this panel helped me decide to focus on managing analytics in a global company as my future career goal. I also received the “WAA 2009 Championship” award together with my friend, Joel Wright. Again in this conference, I became one of the first 10 “WAA Certified Web Analyst”

And now it is the time for DC conference again. This time, I will try to do something different. Instead of just me standing there, I will share the stage with two managers in my team, Dave Nelson and Carol Goh. I will first share Dell’s vision to become the best in class in online analytics and testing. Dave will then talk about a very interesting topic “what a good test looks like”, drawing from his experience as the Global Testing Manager, managing the global testing roadmap. Carol will then talk about how to improve process to scale the testing program globally. I think this will be a great topic and interests to executives, managers and web analysts alike.

If you are coming to DC, please join us and you might be lucky to win a Dell Adamo XPS!

If you haven’t decided, I hope my experience in the last two years will help you make the case to yourself and to your management. Believe me, it worths the money.

This is probably by far the shortest presentation I have delivered. But the message is simple and clear: as Dell is building our online analytics & testing capability and really focus on investing in people, process and technology, NOW is the best time to join Dell and really make a big impact.

Are you fired up by this? Let me know if you are.

Believe or not, in about a month, I am going there again. Now this time, in addition to sit down and listen to those mind blowing presentations, I am actually going to stand up and speak about our journey in the last couple of years. The title of the presentation is “Dell’s Evolution–Leveraging Analytics Globally as a Key Strategic Business Driver”. My boss, Gautam Madiman and myself will co-present this topic and we will describe the unique approach Dell is taking to evolve analytics globally and the positive impact it is having on the business. We will cover a broad view of Dell’s web analytics strategy, organization structure, technology and internal processes along with specific key wins that the program has delivered.

Looking back past twelve months, we have made tremendous achievements including:

• Rollout the first enterprise wide web analytics solution with advanced segmentation technology is in development
• Built a process through which multiple functions and business units can discuss and prioritize analytics and optimization requests
• Launched numerous high impact analytics, testing and targeting programs
• Developed a global analytics team with talented and passionate individuals in HQ as well as regional hubs
• Most important of all, now we understand what the vision is and how we can get to there and we are having a lot of fun in the process!

So come to listen to us if you are in DC this year. I understand it is not easy to make the investment to go any conference in the current environment, but if there is only one conference you could go, absolutely go to the eMetrics Summit. Let me know if there is any specific topic you would be interested in hearing.

By no means, this is going to be a very special trip. Not only I am going to attend the first WAA Board of Directors meeting followed by eMetrics Summit from Tuesday to Thursday, but also because everything else going on, specifically the whole swine flu thing.

In my backpack, I’ve got my iPod loaded with songs, podcasts and sermons I like, Nikon Coolpix, to take pictures and videos whenever I want, Logtitech Webcam, to talk to my wife and kids with ooVoo, and of course, my Dell laptop, to work at night when all the eMetrics craziness is gone.

But this time, I’ve got something else. My dear wife, fearing of the pandemic spreading of swine flu, bought me two 3M N95 masks, and a gelFast personal hand hygiene unit. Imaging on my belt, there is hand sanitizer on the left, and Nikon Coopix and my Blackberry Pearl Flip on the right. No matter what, I’ve got myself prepared.

I definitely don’t think I am a risk averse type of person. If I was, I wouldn’t choose to risk my life and climb big mountains with a bunch of amateur student mountaineers from college. Quite contrarily, I think I am a type of person enjoy risk taking. But to risk my own life is one thing, to put my family at risk is another. Bible says, “A wise man is cautious…” (Proverb 14:16) Why a wise man needs to be cautious? Because he needs to take care of his family!

I booked my travel and registered eMetrics summit two weeks ago but only made up my mind until Friday when I told my wife, “Honey, I think I will go, but with extra caution”. She gracefully agreed. What complicated the situation was she suddenly got a fever on Friday night and had 101 temperatures. We were about to attend spring outing with the church group on Saturday morning and a house party with my wife’s colleagues in the evening. We canceled both. Although we know the chance is slim, we didn’t want to take it, and we didn’t want others feel uncomfortable either. I almost gave up. No matter how much I love this “web analytics” thing, I can’t leave my wife behind especially when she is sick.

But thank God. My wife feels much better today and she encourages me to go, at least for the Board of Director meeting because she understands that’s very important to me.

Maybe you are laughing at me…maybe you think we are over concerned. The reason I am telling you all these is that I want to say “thank you”, as the newly elected Director of the Board of WAA. I understand how difficult for you to come out and make time for this three days summit. It is challenging to get companies to pay for the registration fee, travel and lodging these days, as each one of them is cutting back on OPEX. It is uneasy to leave families, friends and communities behind. The three days’ summit is not like a vacation, but a brain washing, quite painful if you are not used to it. And when you are back, your managers expect you to deliver immediate 1000% ROI…do the math and calculate how much conversion rate you need improve.

I understand all these, but I am confident as you are and believe that these three days will be different. You and I will learn everything as we can. We will immerse ourselves in the ever-changing technologies, thought provoking presentations and workshops, not mentioning life changing networkings and meetups…

So that’s my little story of eMetrics. How about you? Do you have your story too? Tell us how you overcame challenges and finally made your way to San Jose!

Overview of the summit

• Oct. 20-23, Washington DC
• Five industry keynotes: Jim Sterne, NY Times, HomeDepot, Hotels.com, Symantic. My most favourite ones are Hotels.com and NY Times.
• Five tracks: acquisition, conversion, retention, social media metrics and data driven organization. Since I am very focuse don conversion, I feel I only utilize 20% of the price I paid to the summit.  
• 23 vendors: Omniture, iPerceptions, OpionLab, Tealeaf, Hitwise, Google…We already have many of those but Tealeaf is my dream.
• About 500 attendees: professionals, managers, consultants
• A wide range of industries: e-commerce, education and government sectors as well as non-profit
• International attendance
• Learn, optimize, networking: eMetrics is not just about presentations. To get to know people is a big part of it. My Linkedin network has a tremendous growth after the summit and I am so glad to put the faces and the famous names together.

Tactical takeaways

• Connecting the dots. We are doing a lot of things but we don’t usually talk to each other because we are living and working in silos. 
  • User design architects
  • Use persona to run MVT or targeting or ODG
• Drive awareness of web analytics throughout the organization
• Help/train/support analytics amateurs
• What to test: 30 factors in Bryan Eisenberg’s new book “always be testing”
• Behavior segmentation overlaid with voice of customer profile

Strategic takeaways

• It’s a journey…and we are still at the beginning of it
• Customer first. My theory is, if we can’t fix customer’s very simple problem, what’s the point to build fancy, next generation application/ feature for them? But often times, we allocate most of our resources for personalization and optimization (big buzz words) while ignoring the dirty laundries
  • Tealeaf-solve customer problems
• It’s not just technology…it takes process and people to get most out of the tools
• Integration is the key
• Focus on future
  • Predictive analysis: Jim Novo’s past/last activity model

An aspiration and a challenge

• It hurts me when Eric Peterson didn’t even mention Dell when he talked about companies able to use web analytics to build their competitive advantages
• But we have hope: we can create sustainable and strategic competitive advantages online by investing in web analytics
• The solution is we need get all of these right: technology, process and people.
• I hope some day I can be one of the presenters and talk about how I able to use what I’ve learned to create value for the company. I am thinking about some topics that might be interesting to you.

The “journey” message came along again with the first keynote from Kim Johnson, VP of Global Sales and Marketing Operations, Symantec Corporation. It is an amazing to see how she is able to manage all marketing segments in a centralized and integrated way, being able to balance the needs of the brand, the product lines and the sales organizations across the globe. For many large corporation, that’s simple a dream, probably never able to achieve though.

eMetrics Passport draw was the next on the agenda. Knowing that I won’t win anything, if the history is truly an indication of the future, I still went to each booth, having my passport stamped and prayed that miracle will happen. Of course it doesn’t. Tom-Tom GPS, $500 gas cards, 42” LCD TV all goes to our lucky winner, but not me. (crying aloud)

The next two sessions I attended both are focused on data mining, behavior segmentation and predicative analysis. Neil Mason talked about how to apply data mining and predictive analytical techniquest to get to grips with issues like visitor segmentation and understanding customers’ propensity to purchase. Gary Angel from Semphonic, continues to walk us through the process of doing behavior segmentations integrated with VOC data.

We talked about segmentation a lot. Avinash even goes to say the clickstream data and behavior analysis is useless without segmentation. But in most cases, segmentation we talked about are more “micro-segmentation”, just another name of different ways of slicing and dicing data. For example, don’t look at the aggregate site level conversion rate, but look at new visitors and repeating visitors. What Neil and Gary talked about are more “Macro-segmentation”: to look at all visitors, find variables that differentiate them from one group to the other, profiling them with demographic or voice of customer information and use the results segments to drive online marketing campaigns. This is the traditional definition of “segmentation” and it is the offline segmentation many companies have been doing for centuries. Neil and Gary are now taking them to the online world.

It’s hard to believe the summit has finally come to the end and the last 30 minutes belong to Mr. Jim Sterne, the godfather of web analytics. He highlighted the challenges ahead of us but also encouraged us to leverage the knowledge we have learned and the network we have built to create value for the organizations we serve and help the new comers in the community. So moved by his words and heart, I asked to take a picture with him like many others did.

My trip to the eMetrics Summit has come to close, now I need think about how to convince my boss to send me back to summit next year. The only way to convince him is to deliver higher value to my company. And I am confident that I can, because I have learned so much in the last three days, and I have got many friends and mentors that can help guide me along the way.

See you next year.

The day started with one of the best keynotes from NYTimes. Mr. James Robinson, Director of the Web Analytics presented “Web Analytics as a Value Driver Across Media”. It is simply great for two reasons 1) it gives us many real case study how they use web analytics data, to drive not only marketing but sales and operational activities 2) the “journey” message just resonates with each one of us. And it gives us great hope that if I am not there yet, I can get there eventually, if I can get the people, process and technology right.

Another great presentation is from Joel Megibow, VP of Customer Experience and Online Marketing from Hotels.com. If NYTimes gives us hope and let us see the light at the other end of the tunnel, Joel helps us find a way to get there. Every company in the planet keeps talking about customer experience, customer centric and other buzz words all day long, but Hotels.com is the one of the few, if not the only one I have seen so far really gets the idea. Joel the VP (not Joel the plumber) leads a team in the company with cross functional experts. They meet twice a week, essentially look at every customer comments, prioritize them, use the “Tivo for the web”–Tealeaf to reply the sessions, identify the real causes and go ahead to fix them, one at a time, no matter what it takes. The executive commitment, organizational structure, technical expertise Joel is able to pull together really make all the difference. He shared a story that he even personally called an angry lady, apologized to her and had the programmers to manually fix the issue for several days before they were able to patch the application. At the end of his presentation, Jim Sterne said, “Joel, you just won me as a customer of hotels.com”. Yes, and me too.

Joel Megibow, VP of Customer Experience and Online Marketing, Hotels.com

Bryan Eisenberg’s “Always be Testing” is the most practical of all. “Testing and Targeting” is not a new theme at all and there are more and more companies are starting to experiment with buttons, colors etc. With Google Website Optimizer, you can even do A/B testing or MVT for free. Bryan not only offer the concepts of “Persuasion Architecture”, but also a free book “Always be Testing”. The book is written with Google Website Optimizer in mind, but you can apply the concept and ideas regardless what testing tool you use. Of course, to add a personal fan fare, Bryan is so nice to sign the book. So here we go, I have the first book in my life signed by somebody I admired!

Bryan Eisenberg, FutureNow

Multivariate Testing Panel-eMetrics Summit 2008

(From Left to Right: Tim Ash, SiteTuners.com, Bryan Eisenberg, FutureNow Inc., Steve Daigneault, Amnesty International, Aaron graham, McAfee. Modorator: John Diorio from Google, not in the photo)

Jim Novo taught two very powerful concepts: relevance and confidence. He talked about how to use his famous past/last activity matrix to predict the future behaviors and use control groups to improve the confidence of the campaign. The concepts are so simple, yet powerful and surelly have great application.

Like any other conference, there are sessions making people fall sleep too. In eMetrics Summit’s case, presentations from vendors are normally boring, full of bragging and in some cases, maybe even attacking their competitions. Not fun, not insightful and not useful. Occassionally you’ll come across a presentation such as the one from HomeDepot. After listening to their presentation, I think their marketing department is better to be renamed as “ReportDepot” because there are so many reports they use and the presenter actually talked about each of them!

Last but not the least, today is the Wedesday, so there is Web Analytics Wedesday, right after the last presentation. I haven’t been to any of the Web Analytics Wedesday in past, but it’s full of fun, and you get free drinks and foods too. When Eric Peterson stood on a chair, he requested Jim Sterne to come close and they received a long wave of applause from everybody, just to thank them to create, promote and nurture this wonderful community, with their knowledge, skills and sacrific. They are our heros.

Well, now I just have that opportunity. The eMetrics summit almost gathered all the gurus in the web analytics field, Jim Stern, Eri Eric Peterson, Bryan Eisenberg, Jason Burby, you name it…To not just listen to their presentations (which you can do online with the increasing number of webinars), but also sit next to them, ask them questions, is the dream finally comes true, at least to me. Many web analysts including me, didn’t have any experience in this field before came to the job, had no ideas what it is or were scared about the page tagging but finally decided to choose this as their careers, partially if not fully are due to the amount of efforts these guys have put together, with eMetrics as a great example. And they are continuing to preach and evangelize the idea of “competing on web analytics” to build sustainable competitive advantage.

The day started with Jim Sterne’s keynote “Tough times call for tough measures” He highlighted the tough problem our economy now has, but argued that marketing optimization, especially online marketing optimization becomes even more important. He emphasized on “customer centric” and focused on optimizing the “buying process”, instead of the “selling process” which is company centric. The three great examples he gave are Willisam Hill Online Gaming, Ford Trucks and MEC Sport Goods, how those guys are able to use web analytics to change their business fundamentally.

The second keynote is Larry Freed from the Foresee Results. He spent quite a bit time criticizing/attacking 4Q survey that Avinash and iPerception recently launched. I guess 4Q probably has helped iPerceptions gain a lot more interests if not more business. However I think Mr. Freed failed to recognize the power of a simple and free tool and what it can do for the company and for the customer survey industry in general, including Foresee Results. I think just like Google Analytics does to search, if you can see how it helps your business, you spend more money on PPC. What 4Q will do is to help companies to see the value of an on-going and on-site customer survey tool and in turn, some of them will realize the limitation of the tool and invest in more complicated solutions like Foresee or iPerception. Personally I think I like what Foresee can do, but we have implemented iPerceptions. Another topic for discussion later.

Eric Peterson came to the stage and his topic is “Competing on Web Anaytics”. It’s funny to hear him talk about “Web Analytics is hard” and tomorrow Matt Langie from Omniture is going to talk about “Web Analytics is easy”. But that’s what guru does like the Kung Fu masters did on the summit of Huashan. They have to argue who is the right and combat with each other with their sword of words. It’s up to us to judge. I think he got the right point which is web analytics is hard and it takes a real discipline to manage the talent, process and technology. Often companies can get one of two right, but not all the three. However I feel his presentation, maybe Jim’s as well, are more for CxOs to hear than the “small dogs” like us, poor web analysts.

During the lunch, Interwoven did a test, asking each of us to guess which fragments of a MVT is the winner. There were 12 persons out of 300 guessed right for all the four fragments. I was one of the twelve but I wasn’t the one lucky enough to win the prize, wii! By the way, Interwoven’s Optimost “Adaptive Targeting” product sounds a very interesting one.

The afternoon started with Jason Burby’s presentation of “Monetizing Site Behaviors–Overview and Get Started”. To be honest, I am a little disappointed with what he talked about, really only a chapter from his book, very basic concept. I actually enjoyed more the presentation given by Jason Carmel, from ZaaZ as well in the following session. Mr. Carmel did a fantastic job to illustrate a problem we all have, which is the web optimization and user center design are both important parts of the whole ecosystem but we seldom talk to each other. I can’t even think of who is our User Center Design Architects at Dell and they probably don’t know who I am as well. Lesson learned and I’ll go back to find it out.

These are major sessions I attended. Overall I feel the presentations are informational, instead of instructional. I think many of us came to here and want to learn one thing or two that we can go back and implement them quickly in our business. If each presenter can bear this in mind and offer at least one practical idea that we can takeaway, that’ll be fantastic…

Maybe this is just the first day…Look forward to Bryan’s presentation tomorrow. He said he needs to adjust his presentation a little bit because he feels this group is more advanced than he thought. I asked if he needs to spend more time tonight tweaking the slides. He shrug his shoulder and said, ” I have over 6000 slides and I just have to pick some of them and fit them together”. Wow!

Oh, by the way, Google guys said Avinash will come tomorrow, annoucing some of their new products. Even we are not using their free tools such as google analytics or google website optimizer, but I still like the google guys. They are young, cool, have many nice goodies to give away and I got a t-shirt from them.

Coming here is not an easy thing. For one, the company is going through challenging times and many travels have been canceled. For another, it is difficult to leave my two little ones and my wife at home. Believe it or not, I haven’t traveled much in the last four years since I came to Austin.

Austin is a nice city and there is no doubt about it. If there is one thing I can complain (I’m learning not to complain anything), that’s the airport and lack of direct flight to anywhere. I don’t understand why I have to fly to Chicago, stop there for one hour and continue to DC. A funny thing happened when most passenger were on board in Austin. The flight pilot asked if there is anybody volunteering to give up his seat for next flight and he can have $200! Wow, if I am not interested in attending the WAA networking event in the afternoon, I would like to offer my seat for somebody absolutely desperate and exchange for $200!

Chicago is likely always, a little bit chilly and rainy, even in the middle of Oct. DC is much better, a mild weather at about 65C. I took the hotel shuttle to the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center where the eMetrics summit will be hosting. First time to the summit, I am a little nervous than exciting and lingering on many questions in my mind: what type of experience I am going to have? Who I am going to meet? What I am going to learn? Even, where I find a good restaurant?

After check-in, reading emails and taking a quick shower, I headed dowstairs for the networking event. There are about 40-50 people hanging on there, drinking, chatting and smiling. Typical social event in America. I am not a social animal at all, even when I was in the business school. I got a glass of wine and wandering around the lobby. After chatting with few people, I met with Mr. Jerry Tarasofsky, the founder and CEO of iPerceptions. A nice guy with grey hairs, he has founded seven companies in past but this one is the most successful. Since Dell is a big client of his, naturally we have a lot of things to talk about.  I think conceptually, many companies start to get the importance of customer surveys. But practically, there is a big opportunity out there for companies learn to use voice of customer data to drive real actions. Since I came to my role at Dell, I have been trying hard to integrate iperceptions with clickstream data and finding a good solution to read/analyze customer verbatim from the open-ended survey questions. I am glad that Mr. Tarasofsky told me they just announced New Tools to Transform Open-Ended Feedback Into Actionable Intelligence today. Sounds interesting and I am going to give it a try.

eMetrics Summit 2008 Washington DC

I look forward to day one of the summit and I will bring with you more of my learnings tomorrow.

I look forward to learning from the industry gurus and fast charging my brain to be a super web analyst. I won’t do live blog for the event, but I’ll try to recap the key learnings from the sessions I attend. Stay tune for more exciting news from DC.