SUPER WEB ANALYST

WAA Announced 2009 Nominees for Board of Directors

Today, Jim Sterne, the chair of WAA Board of Directors announced 2009 Nominees for Board of Directors. Read the full release below.

So I am one of the five nominees in the practitioners category and three of us will be elected. 60% chance, not bad, right? But then I also realize all of them are exceptional performers in their companies. I will be very humbled if I get elected and have to work even harder for WAA so that you won’t be regret for voting for me.

March 23, 2009

Dear Members:

A month ago we put out the Call for Nominations to the WAA Board of Directors - seeking candidates to fill six expiring seats on the Board. We received a tremendous response from members throughout the world and are pleased to announce that twenty-two extremely qualified members are running for election to the WAA Board of Directors.

They are:

Anil Batra, Chief Analytics Officer, Ascentium, USA
Daniel Waisberg, Head of Web Analytics, EasyNet Search Marketing, Israel
David Millrod, Managing Partner, Technology Leaders, USA
Juan Manuel Damia, Partner, Intellignos/SocialMetrix, Argentina/USA
Khalid Saleh, President, Invesp Consulting, USA
Olivier Silvestre, Co-founder, Tealium, Inc., USA
René Dechamps Otamendi, Founder, Ox2/LBi, Brussels
Sergio Maldonado, Director, MV Consultoria, Spain
Stéphane Hamel, Web Analytics Advocate, Immeria Consulting Services, Canada

Ed Wu, Senior Analyst, Global Consumer Online, Dell, Inc., USA
Greg Asman, Director of Web Analytics, Aspen Marketing Services, USA
Peter Sanborn, Group Manager, Web Analytics, Microsoft, USA
Rachel Scotto, Metrics Manager, Sony Pictures Entertainment, USA
Ray Sibulkin, Executive Director, Business and Marketing Analysis, Edmunds.com, USA

Alex Yoder, Chief Executive Officer, WebTrends, USA
Arie Abecassis, President, MindFireInc, USA
Claudia Woods, Director of Strategic Development, Predicta, Brazil
Jonathan Levitt, Vice President of Marketing, iPerceptions, Inc., USA
Kimberly Weller, Product Manager, SAAS Institute, USA
Mark Wachen, Managing Director, Interwoven/Optimost, USA
Matthew Langie, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Omniture, USA
Nicolas Babin, Chief Operating Officer, AT Internet (XiTi), France

Following our initial Call for Nominations, we learned that a highly respected member of our Board would not be returning for the final year of her term. April Wilson, who has made tremendous contribution to the Board and the WAA membership, has decided to step down to allow more time for her professional and family pursuits. She will be greatly missed.

As a result of April’s departure, we will elect 7 Board members this year. The successful candidates will serve two-year terms on the WAA Board. The candidates will be elected as follows:

Consultants: The two highest vote getters in this category will be elected.
Practitioners: The three highest vote getters in this category will be elected.
Vendor: The two highest vote getters in this category will be elected.

We encourage you to review the profiles of each of the candidates and get to know them prior to the election. The profiles include photographs, bios, written responses to selected questions, and audio interviews, and can be found on the WAA website by clicking on the main three pages linked above.

The election will be conducted via electronic ballot from March 27 through April 10, 2009.

For more information about the election process, please read the WAA Board of Directors Election Process - 2009 document, or contact the Nominations Committee.

Thank you to all the nominees for your willingness to serve the WAA - and to all our members whose active participation ensures the success of this process.

Regards,

Jim Sterne
Chair, Nominating Committee
Chair, WAA Board of Directors

Running for the WAA Board of Director as a Practitioner

My name: Ed Wu
My job title: Senior Analyst, Global Consumer Online
Company: Dell Inc.
Country: USA
Sector of activity: Practitioner
Complete profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/edwu06

General background/bio

I am currently the senior analyst for Dell’s Global Consumer Online business. I am responsible for driving strategic analytics initiatives, recommending actionable ideas to fuel the optimization engine, evangelizing, championing web analytics and sharing best practice across our global business units. My prior experience includes marketing strategy, business intelligence, competitive pricing and sales management.

I attended eMetrics Summit and am well connected with many web analytics practitioners. I am passionate about web analytics and see that as the career of choice for the rest of my life. I am also the author of the Super Web Analyst blog.

I graduated from Michigan Business School in 2004, with focus on marketing and general management. Outside work, I am active in the faith community and enjoy reading, writing or just spending time with my family.

Major contributions I will bring to Web Analytics Association and its membership

I believe the most important role for a Director to play is to help set the vision for WAA and develop strategic priorities based on that vision. To accomplish that, the Director needs to understand not only where the web analytics industry is going in terms of technical innovation, but also what’re the unmet needs from business/marketing perspectives.

As a core member in Dell’s web analytics community, I am at a unique position to see how Dell, as the # 1 e-commerce company implement cutting edge technology and use state of the art web analytics applications to drive online innovation and better serve its customers. What’s more impressive is we started with US first but expanded the program to our global business units fairly quick. Like the cliché goes, this is a journey and we are still at the beginning of the journey. I am excited about being part of the journey as I have the opportunity to really bring technology, vendor, consultant, people and process all together, with the ultimate goal to build the competitive advantage for Dell. Of course I am also experiencing the pains of politics, bureaucracy, organization silos, HIPPOs…you name it.

I believe my experience at Dell will enable me to give the board a balanced view so that we, as a team, can set right vision and strategic priorities for the association.

You should vote for me because…

If you a practitioner like me, you should vote for me because the BOD is typically being dominated by consultants and vendor representatives. They are great leaders in their companies and industries and I look forward to working with them on the board. However I think I can best represent your needs because I have the same needs as yours. It’s just that simple. If you are a vendor or consultant, I think you should still vote for me because I am your customer and don’t you like talk to your customer more often?

I have a passion about web analytics. I dedicate myself and focus my energy for the things I really love and web analytics is one of them. As a college student, I led a team with 13 students on a mountain climbing mission and we conquered the mountain with 24,700ft. To prepare for the trip, my team had to practice a whole year, in their spare time and we had to raise $10,000 fund by selling instant noodles, one pack at a time. During my four years at college, I attended and led three such missions and almost lost my life in one of them.

Of course that’s more than 10 years ago and I am not climbing anymore because my wife won’t allow me. Yet I am still a mountaineer fundamentally. I am curious, courageous and I like challenges. I have been doing different jobs but none of them like my current job really satisfying my curiosity and challenging me intellectually. So here I am. Like you, I have learned so much from this community and now I am ready to give back, with passion and dedication. I am willing to spend 10-12 hours a month, or whatever it takes to help bring WAA to the next level.

Where will the Web Analytics Association should be in the next two years?

I would like to see WAA to become the ultimate resource for the members to learn and grow in the next two years. WAA forum is a great place, probably more for beginners to ask “how to” questions. eMetrics forum is great but it is expensive (though well worthy) and only few times a year. What it is lacking is a continuous learning experience for practitioners like us. We have mastered the basis and we want to reach to the next level. We want to see more case studies and learn how we can implement similar solutions for our company. Webinar/podcast is a great medium but there is too much sales pitch. We need a better learning and sharing platform and I think WAA, as the only unbiased and credible professional association, can take up this challenge and fulfill the hungry needs.

In my process to apply for the business school six years ago, I co-founded a Chinese Professional Association where members can share their learning and network with each other, in their journey to apply for the business schools. Today Chinese Professional Network has become the destination for MBA applicants as well as MBA schools in China.

I believe WAA should start to establish a process and a platform where members from different industries and companies can share their best practices in a confidential and non-competitive environment. I know we have this need and I believe many other companies have the similar needs as well. If elected, I will work with other Board of Directors and committee members to define strategy, allocate resource and make this happen as quickly as possible.

What is the biggest challenge facing the digital marketing industry?

I can just speak from my personal perspective–I am not “guru” enough to predict anything in the future. I also learn from my experience that we should just focus on things we can control and let God do his works.

The first challenge I see is the emergence of multi-channel marketing and how web analytics can grow itself to become a true all-in-one solution for companies to analyze its marketing efforts, regardless where they are. I have seen some interesting articles but don’t believe we have cracked the code yet.

The second challenge is the risk of abusing “optimization”. The stories I have seen is we tend to optimize a certain page or even just some elements of the page and rush to declare success when we see a 5% jump in conversion. What we forget is the website is an eco-system and all elements of the site are all parts of the same body. Optimizing one part doesn’t mean the whole body is necessarily better off. We should be extraordinarily cautious when we design, test and implement any big changes and very thoughtful in calculating the impact on the overall business, not just the individual parts.

I think WAA can do many things to help its members overcome both challenges. Only the sky is our limit as we have so many passionate people like you and me. I realized this when I was in the WAW in DC last October.

If you are a member of the WAA, I hope you’ll support my nomination. 2009 is surely a tough year for all of us, and I hope you are holding strong, with a little help from WAA.

Sincerely yours,
Ed Wu

Don’t Fool Us with Percentage!

My super hero, Avinash Kaushik wrote a wonderful blog last week Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques In that blog, he warned us to avoid using four amigos, common metrics that are misleading and yield little insights. These four pigs are:

• Averages
• Percentage
• Ratios
• Compound Metrics (aka Calculated Metrics)

Well, apparently not everybody gets the memo. Sad! Today I got a marketing email from Omniture titled “MarketingSherpa eMail Summit Special Offer” and in that email, I was asked to learn more about  the benefits of integrating email with Web analytics, specifically,  

how StubHub increased their “revenue per email” by over 2,500% and click-thru rate by over 550%  (Download StubHub Success Story) .

wow, 2,500% and 550%, that will surely get people jump out of windows and sign up for the special offer. But not for waving fans of Avinash’s blog!  

The remedy is simple, just go to look at the raw numbers. Unfortunately that’s not something Omniture is willing to give to me, at least not until I give my all personal information and sign up for the white paper. In this case, privacy is not my main concern because they should have my personal information in their customer database. But enough is enough, I lose my interests–sorry for my short attention span.

One final thought for the email marketing people: if you have customer information already, wouldn’t it be so much nicer that the information can be auto-populated so that users don’t have to fill it again to just get the white paper? Isn’t that a big opportunity to increase lead?

Feel free to share examples like this with us. It will surely make us smarter or at least LOL.

Web Analytics is Personal

We all are professionals so we tend to be very professional in what we do. However today I learned that web analytics can be personal.

Well, to be more accurate, I learned that long time ago when I watched how Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson or Bryan Eisenberg presenting in eMetrics Summit or anywhere they go. They are passionate, energetic, and they are personal.

Today I experienced that too.

Today we hit a really great milestone in web analytics within Dell. Several months after implementing SiteCatalyst globally, we presented a global executive dashboard which enables our executives to get a weekly snapshot of the site performance across our global regions.  It gives them a great benchmark, drive standardization of the site, promote best pracitice sharing. More importantly, it drives them to prioritize their web analysts’ time to work on big opportunities, instead of tons of ad hoc requests or routine reporting.

When a senior manager told me, “Oh my this is a thing of beauty! Tear in eye….” and when my director said, “we need turn web analytics from a tool to THE weapon”, I know that we are on something here. Tomorrow is going to be a little different. We might start to see a transformation and a new culture might emerge.

So that’s my thought of today. Web analytics can be personal, can be exciting, can be something you really love. It doesn’t have to be dull at all. Let’s get out of our cubes, start to be like a champion or evangelist within our organization.

It’s your time to shine now, seriously.

Who Am I?

This sounds an interesting question, isn’t it?

Having been worked in analytics related jobs for almost five years now, I often find myself in a little awkward situation. Out of Michigan, I wanted to become a brand manager, eventually a marketing executive, just like the rest of Wolverines did. However I quickly discovered that’s not how people are thinking of me.

There are times my colleagues calling me as “Dr. Wu”. Last time I met with a colleague never met before and he said, “oh, I know you, you are THE NUMBER GUY…” He went on saying that he want to learn from me how he can use web analytics data for his work.

Dr. Wu? Well, I wasn’t a Phd at all.

THE NUMBER GUY? I never think myself that way.

The cruel reality is, the way I think myself is different than the way others think of me.

For a long time I was uneasy with that. I wanted to change people’s perception. My manager wanted me to go out of my “comfort zone”, to become more “outspoken”, or to be more “visible” in front of the senior executives. On my yearly performance plan, there is always something like “improving my organization agility or strategy agility”–if you actually understand what it means exactly.

… …

Until the day when I became a web analyst.

Because web analytics is one of the very few marketing domains requires super, super high level of skills and experience to understand the data, interpret the data and be able to provide actionable recommendations based on data and analysis.

Unlike a brand manager position, this doesn’t require you of making up something out of nothing. (no offense to my fellow brand managers. ) I have a friend who is very good at that and he called that as BS. (ET, that’s you if you ever read this post.

This world has plenty of people who can do the BS part. Most of them are scared of data. They can create a whole marketing campaign from the white board but when you tell them standard deviation, their face will look blank or they may vomit. Granted I have seen extremely polished people who can do both quantitative and qualitative jobs well.

On the other hand, this world doesn’t have enough people who really enjoy working with data. And there are even fewer people who have a great instinct about data. I meant instinct. You look at a spreadsheet or a dashboard full of data with one eye covered and you get the picture how the business performs. You can almost smell the data and know where is the problem. That’s a God-Given-Gift. (I’m going to name it GGG and trademark it :))

So don’t give it up if you have “GGG” in your gene and trying to be somebody else. Let people call you Dr. , the number guy, or even the nerd or whatever they want to call you.

Play strength, not weakness.

That’s where I am at when I think of myself.  A data driven marketer who have a great instinct about data. An analyst who can help other marketers to understand their business and identify problems and opportunities.

So question for you:

Where are you at? How do you think of your role as a web analyst in your organization? Are you happy about it or upset about it?

Please share at least one tip to become a happy web analyst!

Super Web Analyst’s Not-to-missed Free Webinars

Webinar is a great way to learn from the industry thinkers and vendors, especially when you can’t afford to go to expensive eMetrics Summit. You can get a lot of great presentations right in your cube, or your home, and best of all, most of them are actually free.

Here is the list of free webinars coming up in January. Make your time to attend the ones you are interested in.

Jan. 8 WAA 2009 Outlook Survey Results by Web Analytics Association

Thursday, January 8, 2009 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT

[Summary: The second annual WAA Outlook survey results are in - and you might be surprised to learn what the future holds for the industry! This is a members only webcast.

We surveyed over 600 Web analytics end-users in order to get a pulse on where they see the industry heading in 2009.

Whether you're in the business of Web analytics, digital marketing, or part of any organization with online initiatives, you'll want to take part in this groundbreaking Webcast. ]

Jan 15 2009 - Our Year to Shine by Brian Eisenberg and Jim Sterne

Thu, Jan 15, 2009 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EST

[We all agree that the sooner we can put 2008 behind us the better. Should we be looking forward to 2009? Yes, says Jim Sterne, Chairman of the Web Analytics Association and Founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. He says 2009 is Our Year to Shine. This is the year that web data and web intelligence come into their own. This is the year upper management will be looking to the web for rescue - and you'll be there with the answers. If, that is, you stand ready to move up the to the next level of continuous web marketing improvement and that is all about tactics this year. Jim will lay out the conceptual framework and then tell you exactly where you need to focus your attention to make 2009 the best year yet for your business online.]

Jan. 22 Best Practices in Paid Search: Using Data to Drive Results by coreMetrics

Thursday, January 22, 2009 10:00 am Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)

[Summary: Join Elizabeth Magill, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Coremetrics, and learn how to:

• Establish KPIs for your search program.
• Centralize data and program management to drive better results.
• Use data to increase reach and qualified traffic. ]

Let me know if I miss anything here.

Hey Bryan, are you trying to kill all of us?

There is a lovely Sterne newsletter sit in my inbox when I came back to work. In the first item of that issue, he was trying to sell his buddy Bryan Eisenberg’s OnTarget service with a catchy title “Bryan Eisenberg Looks Over Your Shoulder”. He wrote:

[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!

Game plan for the recession time

No doubt the recession is coming to us. The question is, as a web analyst, are you prepared for the tough time ahead of you? What’s your game plan, if any?

Let’s face the reality.

Several things could happen to us:

1. We may lose our current job. Given the increasing importance of web analytics, this is least likely scenario unless you proved to your company, neither you nor the web analytics worth nothing to them.
2. Even we can keep our jobs, somebody has to go. The jobless rate is already at seven years high but still nowhere to compare the level in the great depression. How worse we can get? The lay-off might not impact you directly, but might impact people you rely on to make web analytics, testing & targeting work. If they are gone, you are left alone with a big trouble.
3. Even we all keep our jobs and nobody leaves, the marketing budget is likely to get cut. And that might impact the consulting services you are using or even just the planned enhancement of your current web analytics solution. All of those might be put on shelf for some time.
4. Even the marketing budget is not cut, it’s very unlikely that it will be increased either. This means you can get the nice customer experience management application that you have been dreaming or if you are a web analytics manager, you are not going to get additional headcounts to expand your global coverage. Instead, you will be asked to do more with existing resources.

You get the idea. So what you do?

Panic?

Well, I am afraid that will do you any good, either professionally or personally.

How about a denial?

My answer is “learn”

Here is why:

We all know no matter how bad the recession can be, it’s going to end, someday, most likely in our life time. The difference for all of us is not whether you can survive or not during the recession, but whether or not you can thrive after the recession. Guess who can thrive after the recession? Of course not those who are panic or denying the reality, but those who take the time to learn and grow themselves. This is true for individual as well as corporations. Checkout Mckinsey’s Learning to love recessions

So here is my game plan:

• Take the UBC web analytics course
• Attending the eMetrics Summit
• Keep myself updated via web analytics blogs
• Learn on the job: what happened (read as Omniture Sitecatalyst), why happened (read as “analysis”) and how to optimize (read as “actionable insights”) This has to be a continuous process and more important in recession than ever before
• Share my learning on this blog and other forums

I hope you have your own game plan and you are welcome to share yours here.

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.

eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 3)

The final day has finally come. To be honest, it has been quite exhausted in the last two days, bombarded by so many different ideas, vendor pitches, roundtable discussion and endless networking…My caffeine intake has been increased from two cups before I came here to … (don’t want to tell you, since my wife won’t be happy about it). Anybody thinks attending eMetrics summit as a vacation opportunity is seriously mistaken.

The “journey” message came along again with the first keynote from Kim Johnson, VP of Global Sales and Marketing Operations, Symantec Corporation. It is an amazing to see how she is able to manage all marketing segments in a centralized and integrated way, being able to balance the needs of the brand, the product lines and the sales organizations across the globe. For many large corporation, that’s simple a dream, probably never able to achieve though.

eMetrics Passport draw was the next on the agenda. Knowing that I won’t win anything, if the history is truly an indication of the future, I still went to each booth, having my passport stamped and prayed that miracle will happen. Of course it doesn’t. Tom-Tom GPS, $500 gas cards, 42” LCD TV all goes to our lucky winner, but not me. (crying aloud)

The next two sessions I attended both are focused on data mining, behavior segmentation and predicative analysis. Neil Mason talked about how to apply data mining and predictive analytical techniquest to get to grips with issues like visitor segmentation and understanding customers’ propensity to purchase. Gary Angel from Semphonic, continues to walk us through the process of doing behavior segmentations integrated with VOC data.

We talked about segmentation a lot. Avinash even goes to say the clickstream data and behavior analysis is useless without segmentation. But in most cases, segmentation we talked about are more “micro-segmentation”, just another name of different ways of slicing and dicing data. For example, don’t look at the aggregate site level conversion rate, but look at new visitors and repeating visitors. What Neil and Gary talked about are more “Macro-segmentation”: to look at all visitors, find variables that differentiate them from one group to the other, profiling them with demographic or voice of customer information and use the results segments to drive online marketing campaigns. This is the traditional definition of “segmentation” and it is the offline segmentation many companies have been doing for centuries. Neil and Gary are now taking them to the online world.

It’s hard to believe the summit has finally come to the end and the last 30 minutes belong to Mr. Jim Sterne, the godfather of web analytics. He highlighted the challenges ahead of us but also encouraged us to leverage the knowledge we have learned and the network we have built to create value for the organizations we serve and help the new comers in the community. So moved by his words and heart, I asked to take a picture with him like many others did.

My trip to the eMetrics Summit has come to close, now I need think about how to convince my boss to send me back to summit next year. The only way to convince him is to deliver higher value to my company. And I am confident that I can, because I have learned so much in the last three days, and I have got many friends and mentors that can help guide me along the way.

See you next year.