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.

eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 2)

If the first day is more informational and inspirational, the second day is more instructional and practical. We descended from 3000 miles high C-level view to the ground level, web analyst view. The agenda is fully packed with many great sessions and if you are not sure what exactly you want to hear, you will be in a big trouble.

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.

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.

eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 0)

After eight hours of driving, flying and waiting, I finally touched down in the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) at about 4:30PM eastern time.

Coming here is not an easy thing. For one, the company is going through challenging times and many travels have been canceled. For another, it is difficult to leave my two little ones and my wife at home. Believe it or not, I haven’t traveled much in the last four years since I came to Austin.

Austin is a nice city and there is no doubt about it. If there is one thing I can complain (I’m learning not to complain anything), that’s the airport and lack of direct flight to anywhere. I don’t understand why I have to fly to Chicago, stop there for one hour and continue to DC. A funny thing happened when most passenger were on board in Austin. The flight pilot asked if there is anybody volunteering to give up his seat for next flight and he can have $200! Wow, if I am not interested in attending the WAA networking event in the afternoon, I would like to offer my seat for somebody absolutely desperate and exchange for $200!

Chicago is likely always, a little bit chilly and rainy, even in the middle of Oct. DC is much better, a mild weather at about 65C. I took the hotel shuttle to the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center where the eMetrics summit will be hosting. First time to the summit, I am a little nervous than exciting and lingering on many questions in my mind: what type of experience I am going to have? Who I am going to meet? What I am going to learn? Even, where I find a good restaurant?

After check-in, reading emails and taking a quick shower, I headed dowstairs for the networking event. There are about 40-50 people hanging on there, drinking, chatting and smiling. Typical social event in America. I am not a social animal at all, even when I was in the business school. I got a glass of wine and wandering around the lobby. After chatting with few people, I met with Mr. Jerry Tarasofsky, the founder and CEO of iPerceptions. A nice guy with grey hairs, he has founded seven companies in past but this one is the most successful. Since Dell is a big client of his, naturally we have a lot of things to talk about.  I think conceptually, many companies start to get the importance of customer surveys. But practically, there is a big opportunity out there for companies learn to use voice of customer data to drive real actions. Since I came to my role at Dell, I have been trying hard to integrate iperceptions with clickstream data and finding a good solution to read/analyze customer verbatim from the open-ended survey questions. I am glad that Mr. Tarasofsky told me they just announced New Tools to Transform Open-Ended Feedback Into Actionable Intelligence today. Sounds interesting and I am going to give it a try.

eMetrics Summit 2008 Washington DC

I look forward to day one of the summit and I will bring with you more of my learnings tomorrow.