This was my second time presenting at the Emetrics summit in London, and once again it was great to be at the event. The presentations were interesting, the conversations were wonderful and it was lovely to see so many old and new friends. Thanks to Matthew Finlay’s excellent efforts everything worked like clockwork.
(Did you attend the summit? Please share your feedback via comments, or email.)
In this post I wanted to share reflections and insights that stood out for me from some of the 20 or so presentations.
Who? Matthew Banks, Lloyds TSB
What? The Power of Targeting
Why? We have all talked about testing (multivariate or A/B) and targeting (as in behavior targeting). We are all well educated on all that we can do in terms of testing pages and experience on our websites. What is delightful is that you can exponentially increase the lessons you can learn from testing / targeting by using the right “triggers”.
Typically you might hear that of splitting and placing traffic into each version of the test. But there is more.
Most tools on the market now allow you to trigger tests by using any number of variables, as the slide shows. The beauty of triggers is that you can understand customer intent a little better and hence place them in relevant tests, but perhaps more importantly when you get the results of your tests you’ll understand them better.
For example rather than simply splitting your traffic, you can test on your search engine traffic by splitting your organic traffic and your paid traffic. Or you can trigger a test between new and returning visitors to see what works, or time zones or … you get the idea.
You can see how you’ll understand the outcome a lot better if you know who is going in. If you are testing then push your team and vendor to apply the triggers mindset.
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Who? Giles Sutehall, BP
What? Managing multiples: – brands, plans & platforms at BP
Why? We have stressed the value of benchmarking often on this blog, it provides context to the metrics that you are reporting on your website. On the web everyone is “competing” with everyone else, others in unrelated businesses are setting standards that you are being measured against (whether you want to or not).
It was fascinating to see this slide from BP that showed that they practiced exactly this type of benchmarking. They are measuring their performance for key elements of customer experience and websites performance against the World Wildlife Fund, Nike, Honda, Alcoa, GlaxoSmithKline, America Express etc. Each company they choose faced atleast some similar challenges and was trying to use the web in similar ways to meet that challenge.
By measuring itself against not just its peer group (ExxonMobile, Shell, Chevron) BP is not only able to judge its performance against the best out there but at the same time it can also learn from companies / websites that might otherwise not be on its radar.
When you think of benchmarking your performance are you applying the same mindset? You should be, the benefits are too large to ignore.
(Data on the slide above is from 2003, current BP performance, in each category, is substantially higher! :)
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Who? Vincent Kermorgant, Nokia
What? Implementing Web Analytics the Nokia way
Why? Here is a common advice: Sit down with your decision makers and understand their business goals and life will be a bed of roses for you Mr. Marketing or Ms. Analyst. It is good advice. :)
The above slide from Vincent was great because it very nicely articulated exactly what you should do when you have that conversation.
I particularly liked the framing: ask for the strategic intent, then don’t let go, follow up with understanding / documenting the micro goals (that contribute to the macro goal success), don’t let them go yet, understand the Resources as well. Keep a copy of the above image / framing handy with you.
This was another wonderful slide in the presentation illustrating the concept of a “KPI card”. Vincent recommends creating a card for all the KPI’s that have been identified at the end of the goal discussion.
The card will document key factors of the KPI, such as the definitions, targets, identify actions to be taken and the owner of the KPI. This can serve as a handy guide for everyone in the organization, besides getting everyone on the same page. You can imagine how powerful this can be, imagine everyone in the organization carrying around with them a deck of these cards! :)
What do you all think of the concepts of complex triggers, expansive benchmarking, goal data gathering and KPI cards? Please share your feedback, and your own tips and tricks, via comments. Thanks.
(PS: My deepest thanks to the 18 people who made it to my London Calling dinner. The conversation was wonderful and the food was nice as well, what a great way to cap off the Emetrics summit! Thank you for taking the time from your busy schedules.)
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Hi Avi – I am a regular reader of this blog for last month. Seems like you guys had a good time in London.I wanted to leave a comment on that google connecting the dots blog. cant find it .. here is the comment. think that you missed google wifi out there to cover the network layer.Its small now , but it has potential.
Cheers
Jose
Avinash,
We were also at the Emetrics in London last week as represntatives for Unica, and enjoyed it.
We have a small article on our site breifly describing our summary of Emetrics in London 2007.
Also I had a look at the Nokia presentation on PDF before which is a great read if you can get your hands on it. (Which i'm sure you already have)
Thanks for your own presentation at the Emetrics Summit; you had good arguments yourself for looking outside one's own company's microverse of website knowledge.
Avinash, thank you for the feedback on this event.
Your reflections are very valuable.
Hi Avinash,
Great presentation you did and it was really valuable information for any website owner. Thanks for sharing with the community.
As always, you're the man ;-)
Kind Regards,
René
HI Avinash,
BP's work seems to be quite interesting. I think more organizations should start exploring analytics beyond behavioral analysis (Omniture, GA, WebTrends, etc.), and assimilate other types of valuable information. I look forward to reading other posts developing a little deeper your concept of Trinity.
Thanks for the summary, the to do list (great work on the presentation) and the coaching. ;-)
I hope to make it to California for one of the summits.
I was very excited going at the London Emetrics summit. And guess what, I was even more excited (and bit tired :-)) when I came back!!!
Why?
Well first there were very interesting presentations such as the ones Avinash mentionned. Great to see "Web Analytics" put in practice at very deep level. So it give you hope for yourself and bring many real ideas as well – things you know that you could put in practice. Not just dreams…
Secondly, I meet many great people. Not only Jim Sterne or Avinash himself (who spent some of his precious time giving me more details on his presentation – thanks for that Avinash!) but also other practionners. I really enjoyed the "open-mind" of the people there.
Finally, it was lot of fun! Friday morning start was a bit "difficult". Too bad I had to head home on Friday and couldn't stay for dinner.
I'll definitely attend next year!
Michaël
Hi Avinash, yes it was a very well organised event. I missed the BP presentation, but it looks like it was really interesting. I particularly like the way they benchmarked against other industries and I'll certainly do this in future.
I also enjoyed your own presentation and you've given me some ideas to think about. Thanks.
Hi Avinash…
Having you rip off your shirt and run into the crowd .. turned the Vendor variety hour into a instant “The Doors” concert – fantastic!!. :-)
I thought I was aggressive in giving out VisualSciences prices… but I must at a minimum add an extra T-shirt in San Francisco. Ha ha.
Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
My Web Analytics Blog – and my quick comments to Emetrics London 2007
Hi Avinash,
As always it's great to watch you at work. Making web analytics easily undestood is a real challenge and here in the Uk one of our biggest problems is the lack of trained data analysts.
We're giving some free tutorials from Digital's Analytics Academy online here – http://analytics.digitalstrategyconsulting.com – but I fear that the industry really needs a conered effort in training if the real potential of web commercie and marketing is ever going to be properly tapped. Meanwhile my favourite story of the conference goes to Giles: http://meadows-klue.blogs.com/meadowsklue_on_media/2007/03/the_tale_of_the.html
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and let me know if we help you carry the message forwards!
Best – Danny Meadows-Klue
Although some companies truly believe on benchamarking as an effective management tool, becomes remarkable that; only those whose agents of change maintain a leadership, agility and support system structure realize the culture transformation. Nevertheless culture measurement play a keen role.
Kind regards
Menes