Report from Emetrics San Francisco

As I write this I’m on my way back to the UK from the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation summit in San Francisco. After three days and having watched about 15 presentations this is probably the first chance I have had to reflect on what I’ve seen and what I have learned. The first thing that strikes me was the breadth of content that was covered. I went to presentations ranging from the “emetrics ecosystem” to usability and from testing and experimentation to social media measurement. The second thing that stuck me was the quality of the material and the presenters. In a show like this it’s possible to hit a duff presentation or two but looking back at my notes, all the sessions I attended were spot on.

So what did I take out of the conference? One theme that came through was there was a lot more evidence of organisations using integrated measurement strategies than I have seen before. More organisations were showing how they use a wide array of tools and techniques to understand the effectiveness of their digital marketing programmes. Voice of the Customer methodologies such as onsite feedback and surveys are the norm, most people are using testing and experimentation approaches and the use data mining and predictive analytical techniques is on the increase. Text mining tools are being used on verbatim comments from onsite surveys to extract the core essence of what is being said.

The stage was set on the first day with a keynote presentation “Competing with Analytics” from author Tom Davenport. There were some interesting things that Davenport said that set the tone for the conference. “The planets are aligned for analytics” he said, meaning that all the necessary components for organisations to adopt and deploy analytical capabilities are being put in place: Data, Enterprise, Leadership, Targets and Analysts. “Using analysis is good, competing on analysis is better” summed up the need to be able to move from insight to action. There is no point knowing stuff if you don’t do anything about it. He described the five stages of an organisations analytics capability from being “Analytical impaired” at the low end of the scale to being “Analytical competitors” at the other end. Organisations such as Harrahs and Marriott ion the US and Tesco in the UK use analytics as a source of competitive advantage.

Another stand out presentation was from Tim Goudie from The Coca Cola Company. Tim described Coke’s journey from the early implementation of their web analytics platform through to the development of their whole measurement framework. Goudie told us that “Metrics are ridiculously political; there is no such thing as a neutral metric”. Once you begin to measure things, then your are likely to start to change behaviour.

Other sessions I attended confirmed my belief that measuring and understanding the impact of social media is still in its infancy. Metrics and measurement frameworks are still in development, debates still stage about the meanings of terms like “engagement” and so on. Fellow columnist Jason Burby reminded us that when it comes to social media measurement of the importance of defining what success looks like in terms of key behaviours and that whilst the activities may be different the underlying measurement processes are the same.

A great take out from the presentation by Ebay was the use of “home visits” to better understand the user experience. I have seen this technique used by consumer packaged goods companies where people from the company visit consumers in their own homes to see them, using their products in real life. This was the first time that I had heard of this approached being used by an internet company. Executives from Ebay would visit users in their homes to understand the context within which the site is being used, revealing more insight into what really goes on than a standard usability test would.

Jacob Nielsen though showed what you can get out of usability testing in the laboratory. He asserts from the many tests they’ve completed over the years that task completion rates are going up and stressed the value of using testing early on in the development process. Oh and by the way “most people tend to ignore junk on websites”.

So this industry is now more than just what comes out of a web analytics tool. It’s about having a range of tools and technologies embedded within strong business processes. As Avinash Kaushik told us it’s about “multiplicity, flexibility and agility”. The planets are indeed aligned for analytics.

 

 

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