Needless to say, I am very grateful and still couldn’t really believe this is all true. I started the campaign with fairly low expectation as I understand how competitive the election is. But history is made. By You, my fellow web analysts.

I want to thank a lot of folks who stand behind me for this election. The first person is Bryan Eisenberg. He is the one asked me to consider running for the Board of Directors and gave me his full support. Joel Wright, my buddy and colleague at Dell, introduced me to web analytics and told me that I’ll win even before the election is closed (good prophecy, Joel!). Gautam Madiman, my manager at Dell, for encouraging me and endorsing me. Anil Batra from Zerodash1, Jonghee from Victoria Secret…and many others I don’t even know their names. Last but not least, for my wife, willing to share more family loads to support my duty as a Director.

So what’s the next? What I am going to do for the web analytics community as a Board of Director in the next two years? These are questions wondering in my mind. I am fully aware that as the only Director on the Board without a CXO title (sah!), I am bringing some unique perspectives to the Board. But to better serve you, I need your help.

May 3-4, I will be in San Jose, attending the Board of Director meeting. I will also be in the eMetrics Summit for the next three days. I encourage you to get in touch me if you are there. Let’s chat about work, life and the community while we are in the WAA Community Meeting and Speed Networking, or WAA Reception, or Birds of a Feather Lunch, or eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit Reception, or Web Analytics Wednesday. Talk to me about your ideas, passions or frustrations. If you are not there, feel free to drop me a note via ed at superwebanalyst dot net or follow me on Twitter @ed_wu.

Look forward to seeing you and hearing from you. Remember, we are super web analysts. No tool (no matter how good they are) can do us any good, until we are using it in the right way, with much passion and intelligence. And to do it right, you’re going to need help and guidance from WAA. Hope you have a great week.

[The following is from Sterne Measures newsletter Dec 15 issue, you can subscribe here http://www.targeting.com/

Ever sat down with Bryan Eisenberg and had him review the conversion quotient of your website? It's intimidating. In seconds, he can tell you seven things you know are true. They're obvious once he's said them. Well now they've found a way to downloaded Bryan's brain into a web server. They call it "OnTarget" and are rolling it out as a pay-per-month service.

So what's it do?
In his words it:

- Continually analyzes and uncovers challenges in over 100 different areas of your website, team, marketing
efforts, and visitors.
- Tells you what to do to fix it.
- Tells you what resources are needed and the estimated amount of time it will take them.
- Uncovers the reasons why visitors aren't being persuaded to do what you want them to and delivers approximately 40 hours worth of actionable recommendations and direction to your team per month on how to resolve it.
- Provides online survey & email campaign tools and reporting.
- Provides automatic visitor identification & reporting.
- Uncovers the effectiveness of marketing efforts and content.
- Provides competitive tracking and reporting.
- Provides lead qualification, scoring, and routing.

I call it Bryan Eisenberg on demand.

I call it way cool.

http://www.futurenowinc.com/ontarget_service.htm

[Sterne newsletter over]

All sounds good. Although it is very unlikely for us to subscribe such services, I couldn’t resist the temptation to click on that link. Knowing Bryan in person and reading his blogs all day long, I know when he has something to offer, it got to be great.

The landing page is well designed with similar information as Sterne summarized. I noticed there is a huge green button “Please contact me” screaming at me -good work, Bryan, you did what you are preaching.

Besides that green button, the second paragraph caught my attention:

[With OnTarget you get the benefit of analysis without hiring an analyst. It is better than simply analysis. You tell us what resources you have available to implement change so that you don't get recommendations that waste your time or resources.]

Get the benefit of analysis without hiring an analyst? Hmm, I am wondering if Bryan’s new year resolution is to kill all of us, poor web analysts. In this economy, I am pretty sure a lot of companies are interested in such strategy.

So I wrote Bryan an email with the exact question on the title “Hey Bryan, are you trying to kill all of us? ”

Bryan wrote back in a day and I really appreciate he took time to further elaborate his points as below:

[That is a great question and one I am glad you asked. Of course, I don't want to kill any analysts, I wish I could clone more of you though. Most organizations are having a difficult time dedicating resources, finding people and getting results with their optimization efforts. OnTarget is meant for those hundreds of thousands of organizations that aren't the Dells, Overstocks, or Amazons of the world.

You know Jim's and my passion and mission in starting the WAA was to create and educate analysts and bring them to the marketplace but while we have been successful, we haven't been able to keep up with demand. OnTarget is meant to bring cutting edge Persuasion Architecture trained analysts, leveraging our technology and help companies improve their conversion rates and operationalize optimization within the organization. Could we help companies like yours, the answer is yes, but we would only supplement and provide an outside perspective to your already capable staff. ]

I was half joking when I sent him the note but I am still glad to know that OnTarget is not meant to kill any of us. Without knowing much details about OnTarget, I believe it will be great tool, just because it’s from Bryan and his company. But from the bottom of my heart, I know a super web analyst is priceless.

And that’s you and me, baby!

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.