These Days will be present on the Web Analytics congres in the Netherlands (Maarsen) on 29 may. Join Siegert Dierickx (Web Analytics Manager These Days) for his presentation of the Pioneer Europe case-study at 15h30.
Siegert will do a joint-session with Google on the benefits of Google Analytics and how it’s used for Pioneer. During the case-study you’ll learn that GA is not only for small companies, but if used wisely and with adequate support of web analytics experts, benefits of a freeware solution can be demonstrated also for larger companies. And as a result of using a professional freeware tool, Pioneer Europe can free up marketing budget for media and advertising campaigns instead.
My jet lag is fainting away a little but my brain still buzzes with lots of ideas and things I need to follow-up. While all this is still fresh, I thought I’d share with you some of the insights from last week’s eMetrics Summit, the world’s largest gathering of people working in online measurement and optimisation.
There are numerous tracks to satisfy beginners as well as more experienced practitioners: Web optimization, Marketing Optimization Management, Campaign optimization, Search Analytics, Email metrics, Advanced Web Analytics and Integrated Marketing.
My three key summit findings demonstrated me that the “way” web analytics is used these days, is gradually changing and some of these changes are setting the path for the future. Here are my three outcomes:
Testing & optimization
Bringing the “testing” culture and the right tools (software and methodologies to do it) into a web-enabled project (website, e-mail or ad campaign) is a key process step in order to optimize and achieve success. The web also allows us to quickly deploy these and continually improve as such. Jason Carmel, one of my Wunderman colleagues at ZAAZ demonstrated the balance needed between testing & optimization in his presentation “Effectively using kittens for Optimization and Usability”. Jason made me laugh, although his presentation was serious shit. I loved it; even with being allergic to your kittens.
Actionable analytics
It’s all about money! For many companies, the only action that matters is driving revenue into the company and profit to the bottom line. But since we live in an Age of “Accountability” and Sarbanes/Oxley we should take web analytics serious in order to prove the value of online initiatives are well spent.
In order to be accountable, you should present the right data and not spend 90% of your time on reporting on “What happened” and only 10% on “What you should do next”. Therefore some mistakes you should not make during the route:
Misuse of data or data overload to analyze
Not-saying-anything reports
Inconsistent KPIs
Stuffed Top x/Y dashboards
Incomplete web analytics implementation
Lack of testing or endless debating about visual design and copy
Instead, you should hunt for the insights and be “Web Analytics Ninja” as Avinash Kaushik stated in his presentation “Hunting Actionable Insights“:
Analyze “What has changed”
Try to share the “Context” of these changes next to the numbers
Give insights, advice, recommendations or steps to take
This will help you in taking action based on the actual behavior of site visitors and as such support the decision making processes.
Business analytics
My last outcome highlights Thomas Davenport’s great keynote which talks about the transition from web analytics to business analytics.
Just like the web, web analytics started in IT, and then marketing found out about it and took control. We are there now, but successful data-driven businesses (and they do exist!) understand the value of the web and have optimized some of their most important business processes around it.
These companies do not manage their data in silo’s but integrate and combine it with web metrics; all because of the accountability that Web analytics delivers to business metrics. The web is infinitely measurable and now more than ever we have data to support our marketing assumptions.
Although web analytics represents only a debatable small percentage of a business’s spending, the value of analytics data is working its way upstream.
The industry is maturing to a level where we will not only talk about using web analytics for marketing optimization, but we will be talking about analytics for business processes optimization and strategic level changes. As such Web analytics and e-business will finally receive their own seat at the board room table as deserved.
To conclude:
We can say that most companies still impose to project optimization or testing cycles because they cannot find the flowers by crunching in tons of metrics weeds.
But for those companies that understand how to optimize based on actionable web metrics, insights and recommendations, huge benefits can be demonstrated.
Besides my outcomes, the Emetrics Summit is not only a great event to learn and see what’s going on but also great for networking. Everybody who practices or is interested in Web Analytics should be there.
Congratulations to Jim Sterne for once again putting on a great event and see you next time!
Be sure to read more about our eMetrics journey in the forthcoming days.
These Days will be present on the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco from 4-7 may. For one week long SF will be “the place to be” for web analytics professionals and we have sent our analytics captains Siegert Dierickx (Web analytics Manager) and Johan de Keulenaer (Director Relationship Marketing) to the mothership of all analytics events.
At These Days we take web analytics and marketing optimization very serious and actively promote our practice within the European part of the Wunderman-network, just like our colleagues of ZAAZ or VML who focus on the United States region.
eMetrics is our annual moment to touch base with the industry, vendors and other professionals so don’t hesitate to send us an invite for a meet & greet in between the great summit schedule. You can recognize us by our These Days eMetrics badges.
On 4 may, we’ll be attending the Web Analytics Association panel meeting to motivate the need for a European approach, not a seperate association, but a local flavoured committee.
More on this topic can be read on our Web Analytics team blog called “ActiveMetrics.”
If you cannot make it then track this blog for regular summit reports including session coverage, announcements (if any) or just the regular summit gossip!
The second day here @ ROFLCon was again kicked off by a keynote speaker. Alice Marwick discussed the fabulous life of ‘microcelebrities’ and raised the question whether Internet celebrities are more honest, true & real than traditional celebrities… During her talk we hoped for more useful content…unfortunately this was not the case.
Clearly, Internet humor is NOT universal humor, it’s locally. And we experienced this during this conference.
Next up: ‘Making it big’: a panel discussion about how some of the ‘big stars’ have made it online. For our entire panel, consisting of Burnie Burns, Brad Neely, The Brothers Chaps, Rob, Kris, Matt and Dave, it happened to be a coincidence… None of them planned to be a star on the net!
Next discussion was titled ‘Incubating the mindvirus’. A lively panel, consisting of Matt Haughey, Josh Schachter, Alexis Ohanian, David Lloyd, Drew Curtis and moderated by Anil Dash, debated the following issues: ‘how did your community form? What do you think is the ultimate positive outcome of your site? The most negative? Where do you think we go from here?’ Some highlights:
Some of the panel members like Drew and Alexis are doing it for their living, but not all of them. it was almost an accident that they started making money, but it takes some time.
Print legitimizes them, getting into the New York Times makes them proud.
The communities have changed over the past 3 years, they became more demanding. They evolved more into an open platform, instead of a traditional community. If being asked about what the creators would like to change about their own community, they responded they like to see more diversity. Most of the time, a community does reflect their creators, however not always.
They gave the advice to the marketers to be legit. If you’re legit, people will accept you. Most things just happen organically.
After asking whether the different community websites felt competition from one another, they responded they didn’t see much competition. They are all sampling out of the web. And adding some community functions around it, but the content is from other sources. The web seems to be big enough for everyone. Nice, isn’t?
We expected a lot from the marketers point of view. Unfortunately they let us down…
They talked about the symbiotic relationship between the online world and advertising. Brands can benefit from the Internet & the Internet is being nurtured by the money from the brands. Unfortunately a lot of brands make mistakes, because their understanding of the Internet & it’s users is limited. They don’t realize that there are great opportunities for brands to interact & look for dialogue without being stepped on their toes.
This involves strategies to develop relationships in an organic way. The Internet has made the people more demanding. You have to do something that is really interesting and the web is giving us the option to do something else. That makes advertising more difficult. They also emphasize the importance of being authentic.
The Internet Culture Leaders: moot (4chan), Randall Munroe(xkcd) and Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics). This discussion became more like a meet&greet with their fans. The room was crammed with enthusiastic fans and their rather personal questions.
So if we have to summarize the conference: it looked and felt like a 2 days press conference with the ’stars of the Internet put together in panels talking to and answering questions from their fans… But definitely ROFL!
The first day at ROFLCon started with an opening keynote by David Weinberger. He is a Fellow at Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He talked about being famous on the Internet and how everyone can be famous - in his/her own way. Afterwards they held a panel discussion. I give you a couple bite-size ideas:
* Blogging should be like taking of your make-up, showing your true self, just the way you are. As perfection is the enemy of credibility.
*Fame now follows the Long Tail distribution. Being famous on the Internet can mean different sort of things. It can be a one-to-many thing, one-to-a lot, or one-to-few.
*The Internet audience differs from the TV audience in the way that the first thrives on interactivity and likes to be involved.
*The million dollar homepage: people tend to like stupid ideas. It got more & more attention along the way and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The secret to success is that it evolved into a story, just like the paperclip to house website. It started off as a silly idea but became bigger and bigger as more people got interested.
*Someone points out the fact that the meme-panel consists of young white males. It evolves into a discussion with the audience about the origin of this fact. Some suggested reasons: the amount of free time, their high speed internet access, men are ‘allowed’ to be funny, …
Afterwards, we attended the LOLCats case study. Some highlights of this very entertaining paneldiscussion (ROFL!!!):
*For marketers it’s so unpredictable what is going to be picked up & what isn’t. "You just can’t know where lightning is going to strike."
*The great Internet ideas are not brand new ideas. They are tiny little jumps further than the last (existing) idea. Recipe for a kick-ass creative idea? Take an existing idea (that already has his audience & fans) and take it a step further (LOLTrek).
*The idea is not where it stops - the execution is equally important (especially when not community-driven).
Last panel discussion of the day was Pwning for the Good of Mankind. Not much to mention here.
During the whole day we were totally struck by the interactive & excited audience. From the first moment the audience has a great need to express themselves. They strive for interaction, participation & discussion. Is this typically American? It may be so that Americans are a lot more talkative and like to be more actively involved than us, Belgians. But I think, more importantly, that the reason is that the audience consists of Internet-fans, Web 2.0 lovers. This subculture is not only more actively involved but this conference is also about their favorite subject.
Concluding thought: ROFLCon is definitely his name worthy!
You can read our thoughts about the 2nd day @ ROFLCon tomorrow… See you!
We’re Liene & Annabel! For the next few days we will be your guest bloggers from Boston, Massachusetts. We’ll be attending ROFLCon on April 25th & 26th.
On the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona early February, the development of the Mobile Internet was a main topic. For the first time, internet companies such as Google, Yahoo! and also Microsoft got more into the spotlight than the traditional exhibitors like Nokia, Samsung or the mobile operators.
Many presentations at the Mobile World Congress proved that operators are realizing that the mobile web and other media services are the way to the future. Consequently, there was a storm of announcements regarding new strategic developments on this area. Nokia formed a strategic alliance with Google. Yahoo! launched OneConnect, the link between your GSM and a range of social networks. The first prototypes of mobile phones equipped with Google’s Android operating system was eagerly presented. MSN Direct now also has a mobile version. Even the European Commission is now getting involved and wants to see a serious decrease of international roaming costs for consulting the mobile internet as of mid 2008.
So what about the development of the mobile web in Belgium? On the Web Goes Mobile seminar in November last year, Proximus and Mobistar came with an unprecendented exclusive: for the first time, numbers were presented in a joint presentation about the use of their mobile portals in Belgium. Some of these released figures are striking:
- Every month, 600.000 mobinauts visit the portal sites Vodafone Live! and Orange World
- Orange World and Vodafone Live! daily receive more than 65.000 users
- 2,5 million Belgians have a mobile internet compatible phone
- More than 100 mobile internet sites are registered on PlazZza and every month 5 to 10 are added
With such figures, the mobile portals of the operators arrive in the Top 20 of the most visited websites according to the CIM/Metriweb chart. It won’t come as a surprise that both Proximus and Mobistar are now eyeing the advertising market with specific mobile marketing formulas.
Recent studies by InSites have shown that the mobile internet with the general public is mainly used by youngsters: 75% of the users is situated in the age category 15 – 35 years. There is also a large interest for the mobile web with professional users. For them, consulting mobile information means an important increase of their efficiency.
The offer on the mobile web currently concentrates mainly on the sale of mobile content: adult content, logos and ring tones, infotainment (news, weather, …). However, we can expect that there will be a rapid enlargement in the coming years. In France, where the development of the mobile internet is a few years ahead of Belgium, the consultation of weather forecasts on MétéoFrance was the most visited service in 2007, way ahead of the providers of ring tones.
The big guys are now getting ready to conquer the mobile web. It is up to you if you want to jump the band wagon and already now adjust your mobile internet strategy.
All over the internet, reports are flooding in of angry computers attacking their users. People have reported to been bitten by their laptop, or smacked in the face by their computer.
The Healthy Computing Volunteer Group, also known as the HeCoVoG, has asked us to develop the global warning website www.jealouscomputers.com and help them to sensitize the world of the serious danger.
Below you see a picture of a this new kind of injury, used with kind permission of the victim.
If you are the victim of a jealous computer attack, or you’ve filmed or taken pictures of an attack, warn the world & send us your story!
The threat is real, as you can see in the follow clip.
We’re all living in the future. No, that’s not a George Michael song.
It’s actually true. We’ve made it the subject of a new website for Nokia’s N95 – which is an incredible device that combines all sorts of previously tricky things like wireless internet, gps, nice photographs… it even makes calls. Anyway, we got a bunch of experts to give us their insight into how technology is changing our lives in ways you don’t expect. A new theme is uploaded every week - chapters on ‘internet’ and ‘music’ are already up there. So what are you waiting for? Take part in the debate at www.nsights.be.
Back from a fantastic trip to San Francisco!
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