Thursday October 23, 2008

Emetrics Summit October 2008

I was fortunate to attend the Emetrics Summit this week in Washington, DC. As always, it was a great conference. Here are my general impressions.

An unavoidable theme was concern over the economy.  Attendance seemed a bit down, and many conversations included some sighs and rolling of eyes about upcoming budgets and staffing.  Other than those happy thoughts, there was much of interest.

Major themes I picked up on were:

Where are the case studies and success stories of major business decisions being driven or influenced by Web Analytics results?  Plenty of examples of web optimization based on WA data, but has this work become a significant driver of the core business?

The "Web" in Web Analytics is fading with the topic being more simply "Analytics", i.e. Marketing Analytics or Business Intelligence, or whatever you want to call it.  It is getting harder to put a fence around "Web Analytics" as it is just part of the marketing data ecosystem.

There was an interesting panel discussion about privacy issues: pending and potential litigation; inconsistencies between privacy in different environments (e.g. people willing to share everything on their Facebook page, but also deleting cookies to preserve their privacy); privacy vs. value to the customer (no problem if my grocery store tracks everything I buy as long as I get 50 cents off mayonnaise,  but don't you dare give me a metrics cookie as I get no value from it).  Policy and standards development here is slow coming, but still seems like the elephant in the room.

Seems to me to be a flood of A/B and MVT vendors and solutions.  Seems everybody was touting their version of a solution.  Yet, I did not hear too many examples in conversations about successful MVT testing.  Maybe I was just talking to the wrong people, or went to the wrong talks.  Or maybe it is harder than people are willing to admit.   

I noticed more attendees from the public sector (e.g. government) than in the past.  Individual conversations with these folks is always mind shifting to a person in the private sector as they have special challenges around quantifying and measuring their goals which are not as simple as, say, counting revenue.  How exactly does one measure, for example, if one's Web site has contributed to responsible policy formation for United States energy resources.  I would like to see a pubic sector topic raised to keynote presentation status at a future Emetrics Summit.  

More talks than I've seen in the past about artificial intelligence.  Still seems a bit on the forward edge, but quite a bit of interest at the talks.

Speaking of forward edge, went to a talk on metrics in the virtual world, e.g. Second Life.  For starters, I would probably be corrected for calling it a virtual world, but my ignorance aside, the talk made some interesting points about the ability to build brand with avatars, challenges this space is having as it matures, and an assertion, probably true, that this will be an environment which will require involvement from the marketing and measurement community as a matter of course before long.