London Emetrics round up

A couple of weeks ago I got my annual sense-check of the state of the web analytics industry in the UK and the rest of Europe at the Emetrics Summit in London. The two day conference format attracted around 150 participants from across the industry and across Europe. Having just reread my report on last year’s London Emetrics Summit, it was interesting to see how the industry is developing and the issues that people are currently talking about.

Growth in the web analytics industry in Europe manifests itself in many ways. Web Analytics Wednesdays are being held across Europe with strong levels of attendances. At the last event in Scandinavia, I’m told that they had to turn people away because the room couldn’t hold enough people. For the second year there is an Emetrics Summit in Germany and it moves to a 2 day format. There is also talk of other locations in the future. The spread of interest and expertise across Europe was also demonstrated at the London EMetrics Summit. I met delegates from Belgium, Holland, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Estonia all coming together to learn, share and network.

I also met delegates for whom this was their second or third attendance at the event. Some of them are consultants and agencies but there were also some practitioners for on a repeat visit. I think this also is evidence of some maturity of the market with people who are developing a career in the industry.

So what were people talking about?

Well, I think this year there was a greater variety of content than before, which I know was intentional. There were a number of presentations where organisations were describing the journey they had been on, the challenges they had encountered, the mistakes they had made and the learnings they had taken from them. These are useful sessions for people who are early on in the experience with the field of web analytics as it gives them a roadmap for their own development.

It was good to see examples of more advanced applications of web analytics being presented as well. Last year in my round up of the 2006 summit I said:

“One frustration is a lack of any evidence that companies are engaging in systematic testing. The challenge here in Europe is one of scale. Internal or external costs of running testing programs are probably too high, except for the very largest organizations. Hopefully, the technology costs will come down enough to enable more companies to use this type of analytics as part of the way they do business in the future.”

This year there were two contrasting presentations from client organisations based on the theme of testing. Skype presented their experience of running A/B tests on key pages on their site using Offermatica and Boden, a clothing retailer, presented their experiences of testing which was using in-house methods, splitting the traffic themselves and measuring the effects using their web analytics tool. Two different operational approaches but the encouraging thing was that both companies were able to report significant increases in conversions through their testing programmes which helps with the business case for testing going forward. I’m sure this year that we will see a much greater adoption of systematic testing programmes.

Another theme that came through was behavioural targeting. There’s been some noise about this in the UK this year with Omniture’s acquisition of Touch Clarity and one of the UK’s leading banks, Lloyds TSB, presented a case study based on their deployment of that technology. Again, Lloyds TSB reported that the additional revenue they are generating from behavioural targeting is several times the investment in the programme. The more the message gets out there that the investments in web analytics and associated technologies can generate positive and significant returns, the better!

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