What’s your title?

The web analytics Yahoo group is having some funs these days. If you are not in the group, here is the replay for you:

It all started with a simple question:

I am looking for what you folks call your analytics folks. I am the Digital
Audience Analyst for a media company. I use cutting edge Web Analytics software
and stay current in industry research. I am not sure what folks call the
Analysts who perform their web analytics and administer the codes and analysis.
Please respond and let me know.

The replies are just pouring in:

"I work for a very well known UK Premier League Soccer Club.

They refer to me as their 'Website Analyst' - although my remit seems to reach
far wider than the 2 websites (one content, and one e-Commerce) that we
maintain.

In the last few weeks I have worn more hats than a habberdasher. SEO, PPC
Marketing, Web Analysis, useability testing, management reporting, yadda,
yadda..."

"My current title is "Web Metrics Analyst", at an ad agency."

"Web Analytics Specialist"

"I work for a creative agency and my title is Web Analytics Specialist. I too
wear many hats (some of which are not even related to WA). Hope this helps!"

"While so many other appropriate names were put forth...I'm compelled by this
query to respond with:

'There are those who call me.....Tim!?'"

:Web Analytics Analyst (in the Department of Redundancy Department I think)

By far my favorite title!!?:)"

Jim Sterne, threw in the most authoritative and complete answer:

Among the more interesting titles of people who came to the eMetrics Marketing
Optimization Summit in San Jose:

Advertiser Analytics Engineer
Advisory Solutions Architect
Assistant Director, Business, Management, Legal & IT Programs
Chief Analytics & Optimization Officer
Chief Analytics Officer
Chief Search Officer
Chief Strategy Officer
Chief Visionary Officer
Client Engagement Manager
Content-Management Expert
Corporate Marketing Brand Manager
Creative & Optimization Manager
Customer Experience Consultant
Customer Intelligence
Digital Marketing Analyst
Director of Analytical Consulting
Director of Analytics
Director of Business Analytics
Director of Consumer Marketing
Director of Data Insights
Director of Data Strategy
Director of Decision Support
Director of Digital Research
Director of eBusiness
Director of Insights and Optimization
Director of Online Operations
Director of Optimization Services
Director of Research, Entertainment & Games
Director of Retention
Director of Search & Analytics
Director of Strategic Business Analytics
Director of Solution Engineering
Director of User Experience Optimization
Director of Web Business Strategy
Director of Web Strategy
EBusiness Analytics Manager
EBusiness Metrics & Analytics Manager
Emarketing Analyst
Executive Director of Business and Marketing Analysis
Financial Analyst
Founder, Chairman and Chief Revenue Officer
Interactive Marketing Analyst
Media Analytics Manager
Merchandising Manage
Online Engagement Strategist
Real Time Analytics Architect
Search Marketing Specialist
Senior Analytics Manager
Senior Director UX + Analytics
Senior Director, Global Site Analytics
Senior Web Analytics Researcher
SEO Analyst
Site Optimization Manager
Social Media Marketing Manager
Sr. Customer Experience Manager
Sr. Director, Database Marketing
Sr. eCommerce Analyst
Sr. Manager Marketing Analytics
Sr. Manager, Experience Design
Sr. Manager, Global eCommerce
Sr. Marketing Operations Analyst
Sr. Marketing Strategist
User Research and Analytics
Vice President, Global Analytics and Optimization
VP Analytics
VP Internet Business and Technology
VP Marketing & Analytics
VP of Blogging Evangelism
Web Analytics Analyst (in the Department of Redundancy Department I think)
Web Analytics, Corporate Marketing
Website Optimizer
Worldwide Marketing Operations

As for myself, my formal job title at Dell is Senior E-business Consultant which I don’t like. I actually changed that to Senior Analyst, Web Analytics and Optimization on my business card, as I feel this reflects my real role and responsibility much better. The dream job title I want, is what Avinash Kaushik has, “Analytics Evangelist”. The truth is though, it probably doesn’t matter what your job title is. What really matters is who you are and what you do.

But it is complete ok to have fun. So what’s your dream job title?

In Memory of Hosam Elkhodary

I have no idea who Hosam Elkhodary is until I got the following email from Jim Sterne on April 7

[Jim's email:
Dear Friends -
I am so very sad that the web analytics industry has lost an enormous proponent, eMetrics enthusiast and talented UBC WA instructor. Hosam Elkhodary's heart gave out suddenly yesterday. There are very few details at the moment but it was completely out of the blue. Those of you who met Hosasm know of his passion and his joy for our industry.
He will be missed. ]

Since then, there are a number of emails flooding in the WAA yahoo group from people who know Hosam very well such as Aaron W, Anil Batra & June Li. A donation fund in memory of Hosam was also set up and here is the link to the Heart and Stroke Foundation  June specifically reminded us,

“In addition designating that the contribution is in memoriam of Hosam, please make sure you address the card as follows, which will doubly ensure the donation is directed properly:
Abdalla Elkhodary
7 Delaney Drive
Ajax, Ontario
L1T 4B2″

And that’s what I did just few minutes ago.

The sad loss of Hosam made me recall how my dad passed away in a similar fashion 11 years ago. My mom, my sisters and I were left with sorrow and grief for many years and we still can’t completely get away from the fact that he left us at such a young age. My dad died when he was 49 years old and I guess Hosam is probably even younger.

All these just remind me how much I should cherish the life I have now. As we are optimizing website all day long, let’s not forget there is a deeper meaning of our lives.

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

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!

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.

eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 1)

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.