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.

We gave away five of my favorite books from leading authors such as Jim Sterne, Avanish Kaushik, Bryan Eisenberg,  Tim Ash & Jason Burby but I had to confess to the group that I haven’t finished all of them.

I did a short presentation on Dell’s vision to become the best in class organization of online analytics and testing followed by a really interesting and engaging panel discussion with five key members from our team. The group asked a lot of questions on our implementation strategy, difference in Consumer and Commercial online business and the panelists’ experience etc. My favorite part is what Kane Burns said, “(my job) is a happy medium between analytics and ability to influence business” Well done, Kane!

Here are some photos

Here is the presentation if you’d like to download WAW at Dell

Finally, below are all job positions still open in CSMB Online, Global Online and Public Online. Apply now if you are still interested in joining Dell!

Today I am glad to tell you that we have a number of openings in our CSMB Online Analytics & Testing organization. To be exact, 10 openings total globally! And here is the summary:

• 1003T2QG -Senior Analytics Manager, CSMB Online, 1 position available
• 1004FOZS- Senior Online Analytics Program Manager, supporting Behavior Targetting, 1 position available
• 1004FPJS – Senior Online Analytics Program Manager, supporting Interactive Content, 1 position available
• 1004FPX4 –Senior Online Analytics Program Manager, supporting Shopping Experience, 1 position available
• 1004FQAG – Online Program Analyst, supporting various programs, 4 positions available
• 10018M14 – Senior Web Analyst SMB Europe, 1 position available
• 10018JZS – Senior Web Test Manager Consumer Europe, 1 position available

How to apply?

This link details the application steps. The key is you need to use the job search tool to find the right job. Once you are on the job search page, you can use the 7 digit job numbers, all starting with “100″ as you can find from above.

Let me also offer some practical tips. Free of charges of course It may save you sometime and help you find the dream job.

• If you are still not convinced that Now is the best time to join Dell, don’t worry, I am here to help you. Just let me know what your question is and how can I contact you, and I will be very happy to discuss with you.
• If you are not sure which job to apply, just pick the one seems most interesting to you. What we will do is to make sure to help you find the best position matches your interests and strengths, even that’s not necessarily the job you applied.
• Make a killer resume. If you can’t find a good example, checkout my linkedin profile. The key to highlight is what you have achieved through analytics and testing, NOT what tools you know and what data you provided. So focus on results, results and results! And please don’t send us a 10 pages resume.
• Prepare your interview. If you have a strong resume, you will be invited to interview. And the interview questions are…oops sorry I can’t disclose that.

Finally, did I mention that we might be open for remote options, depends on the job and your background? Yes we are. So for those of you who haven’t made to Austin, Texas, worry not because now you might get to work at Dell without moving. For those who have been to Austin before, I am sure you are convinced that this is the best place to be!

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.

In this post, I am going to talk about the first “M”, Monetization. In web marketing, when people talk about monetization, they usually refer to one of the two activities: the first is about how to utilize the real estate on a website and sell the space to other companies who might be interested in showing ads there. For example, if you look at www.dell.com/home you’ll find there is Nokia and Vizio sitelets at the bottom of the page.

The second is actually what I want to address here: “monetization” in web analytics’ sense, refers to the process and methodology to quantify the possible financial impact of an optimization effort based on certain facts and assumptions.

Monetization is a great tool to sell an optimization project. Obviously agencies use it a lot in their fancy presentations. Shane Atchison and Jason Burby from Zaaz wrote a whole chapter “Monetizing Site Behaviors” in their book “Actionable Web Analytics” (You can preview most pages at Google Books They built a simple yet nice template. You can view the sample here.

Of course, the same concept and similar template can be used by practitioners to prioritize the optimization roadmap.

At Dell, we have a site optimization meeting on the weekly basis. One critical item always on the agenda is to review the testing & targeting roadmap. When we first started with testing, we feared that we didn’t have enough testing ideas. But once the ball is rolling, we often find ourselves faces the problem of too many ideas. Almost everybody from HIPPO’s to sales agents has something in their minds that they are curious about and want us to test. Of course, only less than 20% of those ideas are truly valuable. Spending any time on 80% of the rubbish, your testing program is at risk to fail. How do we get to identify the 20%? We do monetization-we estimate potential impact from each test and prioritize based on dollars amount as well as ease of implementation. Using data instead of emotion to argue with those who are passionate about their testing ideas is such a life saver.

In addition to help prioritize test roadmap, it can also help us prioritize the analytics roadmap. Does analytics need a roadmap? Yes, of course! As a web analyst, I always find myself swim in the sea of tons of different requests from executives I support. The only way for me not to drown in the sea is to prioritize by monetizing all requests. The question I always ask myself is “how much more revenue or margin I can bring to the company if I spend this many hours on this request?” Astonishingly, many times I found the answer is “none, not really”. So I move on. I am lucky to have an alignment with my direct management on this process. He and I often sit down, during our weekly meeting, to review the projects I am working on and prioritize it based on monetized values. Of course, we both realize that we still have to do some monkey works nobody wants to do, such as clean up data etc. That is just part of our lives and we all have to live with it. But if you are spending most of your time in the monkey works, I am pretty sure soon you will either burn out, or find yourself replaceable.

Our time is VERY precious. In fact, I believe the most valuable asset a company has to drive site optimization is not any of the tools, either free ones or the ones they pay millions of dollars, but the time of its web analysts. We can either protect this valuable asset or let it be ruined. We shouldn’t do any analytics just for the sake of analytics. Nor we should do any analytics only to satisfy somebody’s curiosities. The end result of analytics should be either concrete recommendations to the business that some parts of the website needs to be changed, or some test ideas that the testing team can take over to execute.

Monetization is a great friend of web analysts and we all should wholeheartedly embrace it. Sadly I find often we rush from “Analyze” to “Optimize”, without really “monetizing” the efforts. Do it now, and it will help you live longer and happier.

First, let me explain what the acronym really means:

“A” stands for “Analyze”; First “M”, stands for “Monetize”; Second “M”, stands for “Mobilize”; “O”, stands for “Optimize” .

See, I managed to find four words all end with “ze”.

“Analyze” is straight forward. That’s what we, as web analysts do every day, so no need to explain, right?

One thing I want to caution is though, we need make sure that the data we are looking at is correct. If the raw data is not even correct, then that’s “garbage in, garbage out”, regardless how sound your analytical framework is. The analysis results might be misleading and hurting the business, rather than helping the business.

In the web analytics world, we usually are dealing with two sets of data. The first set of data is either the overall metrics at the site level or the most granular data at page level. For this type of data, it will be hard to make mistake. And if you ever made a mistake, even your HIPPO will quickly point it out for you!

The second set of data is at “segment” level. At this point, all web analysts should know that “segmentation” is at the core of any web analytics project. If you don’t know how to segment your visitors or traffic and analyze visitor behavior accordingly, then you should really go back to the training camp.

But the risk is also with “segmentation”. Anybody has experience with Omniture Discover on Demand or Omniture Insights (previously Discover on Premise and prior to that Visual Sciences) or similar tools, probably understand what I mean. There are two major factors could screw the data. First, the exact way to build the segments: in Discover or Insights, you have many different ways to build a segment and not all of them give you the same data. Second, the sampling issue: due to huge amount of data, a lot of web analytics applications can only give you a sample rather than the complete data set, depends on how much data you are asking for.

With this understanding in mind, it is imperative for any web analyst to have a healthy amount of suspicion of the data accuracy. Not only the data pulled by somebody else, but also the data we pull. Yes, we make mistakes too!

There are ways to mitigate the issue of course. (we have hope-it’s not the end of world!). What I usually do is to make sure that I can get the data from two different data sources and compare them side by side. If you are using Omniture, you should always try to compare the data you get from Discover vs. the data from SiteCatalyst. For example, if you are building a segment for a group of pages, you should at least compare the total visits for that group of pages from Discover with the sum of all visits of those pages. These two numbers will never match but they shouldn’t be way off. If I see a huge difference between them, that’s a red flag to me. [Bonus tip: if I have to bet $10 on either one, I will definitely bet on SiteCatalyst and go back to review the data I got from Discover]

Ok, that’s all I want to say about “Analyze”, assuming you’ve got the rest. In my next few posts, I’ll touch upon the other letters one by one and round up with a final summary. Stay tuned!

It all started with a simple question:

I am looking for what you folks call your analytics folks. I am the Digital
Audience Analyst for a media company. I use cutting edge Web Analytics software
and stay current in industry research. I am not sure what folks call the
Analysts who perform their web analytics and administer the codes and analysis.
Please respond and let me know.

The replies are just pouring in:

"I work for a very well known UK Premier League Soccer Club.

They refer to me as their 'Website Analyst' - although my remit seems to reach
far wider than the 2 websites (one content, and one e-Commerce) that we
maintain.

In the last few weeks I have worn more hats than a habberdasher. SEO, PPC
Marketing, Web Analysis, useability testing, management reporting, yadda,
yadda..."

"My current title is "Web Metrics Analyst", at an ad agency."

"Web Analytics Specialist"

"I work for a creative agency and my title is Web Analytics Specialist. I too
wear many hats (some of which are not even related to WA). Hope this helps!"

"While so many other appropriate names were put forth...I'm compelled by this
query to respond with:

'There are those who call me.....Tim!?'"

:Web Analytics Analyst (in the Department of Redundancy Department I think)

By far my favorite title!!?:)"

Jim Sterne, threw in the most authoritative and complete answer:

Among the more interesting titles of people who came to the eMetrics Marketing
Optimization Summit in San Jose:

Advertiser Analytics Engineer
Advisory Solutions Architect
Assistant Director, Business, Management, Legal & IT Programs
Chief Analytics & Optimization Officer
Chief Analytics Officer
Chief Search Officer
Chief Strategy Officer
Chief Visionary Officer
Client Engagement Manager
Content-Management Expert
Corporate Marketing Brand Manager
Creative & Optimization Manager
Customer Experience Consultant
Customer Intelligence
Digital Marketing Analyst
Director of Analytical Consulting
Director of Analytics
Director of Business Analytics
Director of Consumer Marketing
Director of Data Insights
Director of Data Strategy
Director of Decision Support
Director of Digital Research
Director of eBusiness
Director of Insights and Optimization
Director of Online Operations
Director of Optimization Services
Director of Research, Entertainment & Games
Director of Retention
Director of Search & Analytics
Director of Strategic Business Analytics
Director of Solution Engineering
Director of User Experience Optimization
Director of Web Business Strategy
Director of Web Strategy
EBusiness Analytics Manager
EBusiness Metrics & Analytics Manager
Emarketing Analyst
Executive Director of Business and Marketing Analysis
Financial Analyst
Founder, Chairman and Chief Revenue Officer
Interactive Marketing Analyst
Media Analytics Manager
Merchandising Manage
Online Engagement Strategist
Real Time Analytics Architect
Search Marketing Specialist
Senior Analytics Manager
Senior Director UX + Analytics
Senior Director, Global Site Analytics
Senior Web Analytics Researcher
SEO Analyst
Site Optimization Manager
Social Media Marketing Manager
Sr. Customer Experience Manager
Sr. Director, Database Marketing
Sr. eCommerce Analyst
Sr. Manager Marketing Analytics
Sr. Manager, Experience Design
Sr. Manager, Global eCommerce
Sr. Marketing Operations Analyst
Sr. Marketing Strategist
User Research and Analytics
Vice President, Global Analytics and Optimization
VP Analytics
VP Internet Business and Technology
VP Marketing & Analytics
VP of Blogging Evangelism
Web Analytics Analyst (in the Department of Redundancy Department I think)
Web Analytics, Corporate Marketing
Website Optimizer
Worldwide Marketing Operations

As for myself, my formal job title at Dell is Senior E-business Consultant which I don’t like. I actually changed that to Senior Analyst, Web Analytics and Optimization on my business card, as I feel this reflects my real role and responsibility much better. The dream job title I want, is what Avinash Kaushik has, “Analytics Evangelist”. The truth is though, it probably doesn’t matter what your job title is. What really matters is who you are and what you do.

But it is complete ok to have fun. So what’s your dream job title?

Although his presentation is geared more toward beginners, yet the same principle are applicable for those who want to take their web analytics understanding and practice to the next level: learning (books, blogs, eMetrics Summit etc.), sharing (blogging, speaking etc.), networking (web analytics wedesday, eMetrics Summit etc.) and participating (WAA committees, WAA yahoo forum etc.)

I can’t think of any other way to improve myself and this is an ever evolving, life time process too. The moment you start to think that you know everything, that’s when you probably need find another job.

Now let’s enjoy what Alex brought to us: