Key take-aways from Emetrics

Am slowly getting back to normal – just in time for the weekend – after a busy Emetrics conference this week. Here are some of the things that made an impression on me:

• Not that it should be surprising, but there are some pretty cool people in this industry and I feel fortunate to have met a lot of them in person: John , Eric (congratulations on your move), Avinash, Justin, Ian, Alex (blog some more), Rene, Dennis, Bob…
• I have to agree with John and Ian that some sessions were better than others. I want real-life examples about what works and what doesn’t. I can always read the slides afterwards.
• Speaking of industry, it seems that the web analytics field is surprisingly small, but growing. People still know each other.
• "Optimization" as in multivariate testing was a central theme of the conference. Lots of vendors talking about being able to increase conversions through testing.
• "Segmentation" as in having a better understanding of the visitors to your site. The more you know about your customers the better you can tailor your content and offers. "Where are your customers coming from (both geographic location and the referring source)?", "When do they come to your site?", "Have they bought from you before?"…I will be writing more on this later.
• "Process". You have to figure out what you want web analytics to do for you, who is accountable, what your KPI are, and set up appropriate processes. Most small companies just do ad-hoc web analytics, i.e. with no real thought behind it. Rob talks about devoting a chunk of time to SEO/SEM per week. Do the same for web analytics.
• Lots of big business represented, but with the availability of some pretty cool and powerful tools at little or no cost, I see some great opportunities for smaller e-commerce businesses to give the big guys a run for their money.
• Speaking of big business, don’t assume that they all know what they are doing! Perhaps they are just generating lots of reports ("Give me the numbers") instead of getting real insights and taking action.
• Check out Chris’s Excel tips at Juice Analytics. Very cool stuff.

Anyway, am working on a bunch of ideas as a result of some other nuggets I picked up.

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