Key Takeaways from eMetrics Summit 2008 in DC

Two weeks after the eMetrics Summit in DC, I had the chance to sit down with my team and shared with them my key takeaways from the summit. This is part of the deal that my manager sent me to the summit.

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.