When I think of eMetrics summit, I often can’t help but remembering a great Chinese martial novel written by Mr. Yong Jin, 《The Legend of the Condor Heros》 In the end of the book, the top 5 Kungfu masters gathered at the summit of Mt. Huashan and competed to be the best of the best in the world. That has always been fascinating to me since I was a kid.
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.
