eMetrics: Morning session coverage

Today is Day one of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington, DC.  Jetlag and a lack of caffeine was slowing everyone down somewhat, but the presentations helped to shake the sleepiness out of our heads and start the day.  There were four presenters at the morning "all hands" session.

After some brief administrative notes with respect to cell phones and where to get the aforementioned caffeine, the real presentations began with a presentation by Richard Foley of the Web Analytics Association (WAA).

The WAA has been accepting members since the initial 500 members joined in 2005, and the organization has been enjoying 70% year over year growth and is on track to achieve 1,500 members by year end.  Richard spent some time talking about the educational and promotional mission of the WAA and encouraged  folks to join.

Next up was the Keynote Speaker, Jim Sterne – President of TargetMarketing.  Jim got the conference off to a strong start by challenging all of us to “Think Different”.   (As a side note, Jim had originally planned to entitle his speech “Think Damn it” but was inspired to change the message thanks to Avinash Kaushik).

Jim likened a company’s web site to a fire that is burning cash, and intelligent web analytics is the fire extinguisher.  In order for analytics to work for a company, they need to keep in mind six touch points:

1) Conceptual Framework – events, interaction, participation, and engagement combine to give a picture of a visitor’s behavior
2) Calibrate their emotions – how does the customer “feel” about their site visit?
3)  Remove yourself – be an “over the shoulder anthropologist.”  Keep in mind that you are not the target audience for the web site and neither is your boss.
4) Sharpen your cognitive process
5) Think like a child – be willing to ask an infinite number of questions and engage the data in a conversation by tying one set of metrics to another.  Are we asking the right question?  How does this data interact with this other metric?
6) Keep your sense of wonder.  Measure each metric against a number of  thought sharpeners: clarity, accuracy, precision, relevancy, depth, breadth, logic, significance, fairness

An excellent start to what looks to be an excellent conference.

There were two additional (vendor) presenters at the morning keynote:  one from WebTrends and another from Microsoft.  The WebTrends presenter was Greg Drew, CEO of WebTrends.  Greg’s presentation was two-fold: initially he spoke about the changes in the advertising analysis model from the four Ps’ (product, price, place, and promotion) to the four R’s (reveal, reward, respect, and retain).  The latter four require a little more explanation.

REVEAL
- understand web site visitors and identify common traits
- understand specific, individual customer traits

REWARD
- reward behavior in a way that the consumer wants

RESPECT
- highly relevant targeted offers increases trust and loyalty

RETAIN
- stimulate additional interactions with the customer

The second half of Greg’s presentation focused on exploiting the accumulation of visitor attributes to better target your marketing message.  Greg referred to this as taking 360 degree view of the customer.  The challenge is that many of a company’s interactions with a customer are handled by various vendors, and the various systems are not well integrated.  If you can determine a way to tie your email, web site, CRM, and other systems into an integrated whole, you can better the customer experience.

The final speaker of  the morning session was Ian Thomas, a Director of Product Management for Microsoft.  Thomas was definitely still on west-coast time, and this was unfortunately compounded by some technical difficulties dealing with differing screen resolutions between his laptop and the projectors.

Ian presented the first live public display of Microsoft’s new Gatineau Web Analytics platform.  Gatineau is integrated with the Microsoft Advertiser Toolset and is designed to be easy to set up and use.  One unique feature of Gatineau is that it will provide visitor segmentation data (for example, gender, age, occupation, geo-location) out of the box – without the advertiser needing to collect this information.  They are able to collect and present this information by extracting anonymous information from a visitor’s Microsoft LIVE id.

The second, (and IMHO somewhat scary) feature of Gatineau is that the system includes the ability to log into your site via FTP and “automagically” embed the necessary javascript tags into your site’s HTML.  This is accomplished by your providing FTP access to Microsoft who will access the various files on your server, search for a closing BODY tag, and rewrite the file with the Gatineau code inserted.  This is an optional (and, they claim, reversible) approach to the problem of incomplete deployment of the analytics codes across ALL pages of the site.

The presentation was interesting, and the screen views were intriguing, but the technical issues made the presentation hard to follow and greatly detracted from the impact of what we were seeing.  My initial impressions were that the graphics were pretty, but based on the quick and chaotic overview presented, it was not clear that the visualization tools will prove to be useful.  Hopefully, the rollout of the service will be smoother than the demo.

If you are interested in taking part in the Gatineau beta test, you can visit http://advertising.microsoft.com/gatineau or  http://www.liesdamnedlies.com

For Search Marketing Gurus, Mike Churchill of KeyRelevance Search Engine Marketing