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! ]]> http://www.managinganalytics.net/2010/05/24/join-dell-now-make-a-difference/feed/ 2 http://www.managinganalytics.net/2010/05/17/my-emetrics-summit-speech/ http://www.managinganalytics.net/2010/05/17/my-emetrics-summit-speech/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 03:20:44 +0000 Ed http://www.managinganalytics.net/?p=321 Thanks to Jim Sterne and the Web Analytics Association who kindly gave me five minutes to talk about Dell’s ambition to become the best in class in online analytics & testing and what kinds of talents we are looking for.

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.

When Daniel Waisberg, the WAA marketing chair told me about this, I simply couldn’t believe it. But here is the official announcement as the prove.

Special thanks for the volunteers who made this annual event possible:

•Judges: Jennifer Veesenmeyer, Judah Phillips, Stéphane Hamel and “Wandering” Dave Rhee.
•Logistic & Organization: Daniel Waisberg, June Dershewitz, Clare Madden, Shannon Taylor, Suzanne Carter-Jackson.

I want to make our paper available on my blog as well and welcome any of your inputs. Enjoy reading!

I stumbled upon www.limogesjewelry.com and like the “My Beloved Top-Engraved Message Stainless Steel Band”.

The product looks great at that price. What attracted me is the beautiful verse inscribed on the inside of the band, “I am My Beloved’s and My Beloved is Mine”. The big red “Add to Cart” button is easy to find, so I clicked.

Nothing happened. Click again. Same thing.

Is there a problem with Chrome browser I am using?

Switched to IE, the same problem.

After a few minutes, I saw a little error message on top of the page “Please type in your Personalized Message”.

Hmm? I thought I had chosen the personalized message?

Then I realized that it actually allows me to put in a personalized message for outside of band, up to 25 letters and spaces. This is written as part of the product decription but just completely skip from my eyes.

Ok, I put in “The Lord is my shepherd”

Click “Add to Cart” again.

A simple yet good shopping cart with candy aisle on the left. It also got some good security messages there such as “Verisign”, “McAfee Secure” and “BBB Online”.

So I continued with “Proceed to checkout”

First page is simple, kind of like Amazon’s which I am very familiar with. I am not a returning customer so choose “new customer”

Oh wow, this is a one page checkout layout. I have heard that before but haven’t got much chance actually using it (I do most of my shopping on Amazon which is one click).

Page layout is clean and simple with clear indication of step 1, step 2, step 3 and a big “Place MY ORDER” button.

It’s nice that it provides different payment options including paypal and bill me later.

With extreme delight, I fill in my shipping and billing information and click the big “Place my order” button.

What? Why I have to create a password?

Check the page again. It clearly states only the field with “*” is required and there is no “*” for password creation. So why I have to create a password?

Tried again, same problem.

Now I realized although the site adopted the “guest checkout” concept but it still requires of creating a password.

For what?

What a shame that a delightful checkout experience was ruined by a simple problem like this!

Since I like the product very much, I was willing to create a password to finish my order. Imagine the sales the site could lose for those users who might just bail in such situation. I didn’t bother to Google but I am pretty sure there are other websites can provide similar services, possibly at lower cost.

So what’s my evaluation of shopping experience on Limogesjewelry.com?

It could be perfect, but now I am disappointed.

Good news is both errors could be fixed pretty easily.

All it takes is somebody deeply cares about customers and know how to use usability and testing tools to identify issues and fix them.

But in reality, there are tons of problems like this everywhere on the internet. While the HIPPOs are bragging about their social media strategies and media are busy predicting what’s the next big thing, there are millions of customers are bothered by such problems and billions of dollars are lost due to less satisfied customers.

It’s sad. Ecommerce is sad. As a web analyst working in ecommerce industry, I am deeply sad.

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.

Here at Dell, we have the luxury to choose from a wide range of computers (have to be Dell of course), both standard and non-standard configuration, although non-standard configuration requires of special approval.
Last time when I had to choose my laptop, without hesitation, I chose Latitude D820, a 15”4 laptop, the largest of Latitude D series, the king of all. The solidness of the build, the size of the screen and the power of core duo processor made me really feel like a king, from the first moment when I turned it on.

I have been happy with it most of the time, although the 6.15lbs weight sometimes dragged me down. I didn’t travel much but every time when I was on the road, I regretted to carry it with me. The battery life after the first year has also become a concern.

By the end of June, my laptop is about to fully depreciate according to Dell policy and I am ready for another laptop. This time, again, without any hesitation, I went to apply for a Latitude E4200, a 12.1″ and 2.2lbs laptop, the second smallest in the e-series. Putting it side by side with D820, they are like the beauty and beast.

So, just in two and a half years, I have gone from big to small. Thinking about my personal experience, I believe the PC market has gone through some fundamental transformation in last several years.

First of all, mobility now becomes the deciding factor among all criteria when choosing a computer. Price and features are still important but mobility has taken the driver seat. As consumers, we can now trade off between affordability and functionality, depending on how and where we are going to use our computers. But mobility is something that we cannot sacrifice. This is very evident when you look at the booming netbook market.

Second, “powerful” is not an adjective reserved for big monster computers any more. My E4200 has and can have as much computing power as my D820 does, if not more. The E4200 I have boasts a 3GB DDR3 memory (can be upgrade to 5GB), a 128GB solid drive, a detached DVD-RW optical drive as well as a backlit keyboard. It runs Windows XP SP-3 and Office 2007 Business. What else I need to do my work?

Finally, the battery has been improved to the point that carrying laptop is not longer a burden but a joy. I never carried my D820 to any meeting, not necessarily because I want to solely focus on the meeting (admit it, most of the meetings are counter-productive and boring), but because I was afraid I am going to run out of battery and I have to find a place to plug in the adapter. The 6 cell batter on E4200 can last up to six hours, which means that I can take it to any meeting (God forbids any meeting longer than six hours), or probably watch two or three movies during a trip to eMetrics Summit.

So you see, just in two and a half years, I have gone from big to small, but the power remains.

What’s the computer you are using? What’s the next computer you are going to have?

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.

I had one of these “hm?” moments today when I came across a commentary made by Eric Auchard, titled “A brutal logic to Dell’s reinvention” and you can read the whole article here http://tr.im/tR82  Particularly this paragraph:

“Dell’s current reliance on PCs also has an upside as it leaves it best-positioned among major computer makers for a long overdue upgrade of ageing corporate PCs set to start later this year with the introduction of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7. “

Don’t get me wrong. As a Dell employee, I certainly wish that we are “best” positioned and I work very hard to help make that happen. However I just can’t really understand Eric’s logic here. Some questions I have:

1. Why Dell is more reliance than other PC manufacturers? Dell is not the king of PC any more. Why HP and Acer is less reliance than Dell? You can kind of argue that HP has a much broader portfolio than Dell, but what about Acer? PC is the only thing they make!
2. Why overly reliance on PCs is a good thing? Notice I am not saying it is a bad thing. I am saying it is not a relevant question here. For enterprise customers or consumers alike, nobody is going to analyze how much reliance Dell or HP has on PCs and then make their purchase decision. They are going to look at the product, price, services everything and then make their decision. To assume there is a direct correlation between reliance and the quality of products and services and pricing competitiveness is a serious mistake. We all know HP sometimes is more aggressive in PC space because they have a huge profit pool with their printer business.
3. Finally, I think it is too early to say that the introduction of windows 7 is going to shake up the whole PC purchase cycle. And if that cycle does come to reality like everybody is wishing, it is a “rising tide” effect and everybody will get a free ride. The question is who will grab a bigger pie? The answer to that question again, is on the overall competitiveness of products, prices and services, which Dell is making tons of progress, but not its reliance on PCs.

Ok, maybe I am just too dumb to understand what Eric exactly has in mind when he made that statement. What about you? What do you think? Agree? Disagree?