Hi everyone. This is one of the last things I am doing as the director that works with the Marketing Committee: formalizing our Events and Discounts policy.It is not 100% there, because we will surely run into operational details, but I have gestated it for so long; I think it is time to push it out. (Many thanks to other directors who have helped. You know who you are.)
So here are the issues that we faced. Everyone who was having an event that was related to the Internet in any way whatsoever wrote us and said, "Hey, let's do a 10% discount, and we'll trade out lots of stuff, no money exchanged." And it was a good deal for the WAA and our members, until our newsletter became full of logos, and we found that lots of members didn't care -- they could get better discounts elsewhere, or we weren't really reaching the right conferences.
At the same time, we finalized an agreement with eMetrics; they are now the Official Summit of the WAA, and WAA members get a 15% discount to it. The agreement is actually a lot more in depth, because it calls for lots of cross-promotion. But if the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit was the official WAA Summit, and if we were having trouble with other discounts, what would the fate of all those other events be?
It turns out that these waters aren't as treacherous as they appeared to be. So here is what we are hoping to do:
On the discount front, any event (or book, or service) that wants to offer a discount may, but the marketing committee is going to work harder to get better discounts for you; to get more than one free pass; to only accept events that our members want. You may think it is hard to know what members want (and sometimes it is!), but we do have a track record with a number of events, and we know that if we can't give away a free pass, members sure don't care about the discount to that event. Even when we accept events, we won't necessarily treat them all the same - some events will get mentions in our newsletter, and others will be on our discounts page for anyone to use, but without advertising. It all depends on the agreement we have with the other organization or publisher.
But what about the WAA calendar?
Our goal is to have all web analytic events on our calendar. Some events will have preference (a different color, a higher placement) than others. But if you have a web analytic event, submit it to our calendar! You don't have to be a WAA member, either, because our goal is to have the definitive web analytics calendar, not the calendar where people who are members get to post.
Now for the gotchas: Not all events are about web analytics. This is something that will eventually get pounded out over time. Is it a WA event if 20% of the sessions are on WA? 50%? For example, Search Engine Strategies is an SEO/SEM conference. Yes, they have some analytics sessions, but that is not their main goal - their primary goal is to teach SEO/SEM. So an event like that would *only* get onto our calendar by virtue of having a discount that we accepted. (Now you can see how these things get tied together, discounts and the calendar.)
So different kinds of events will have different colors on the calendar. If you do a discount to your analytics event -- working with the Marketing Committee -- you can probably get more "play" - especially if you also give away some free passes. You won't get the kind of publicity that the eMetrics Summit gets, or that sponsored events (like WAA webinars that are sponsored) are getting, but you will get visibility. And other members will get to see when your event is. And our calendar will be the destination for analysts who want to know where to be seen.
Thanks for your interest in the Knowledge Required for Certification by the Web Analytics Association (WAA). This document contains a detailed overview of the knowledge required to pass the Web Analytics Association certification test.
Back in February, I launched a brief survey too see how web analytics practitioners are communicating our data within our organizations. A mere three months later (sorry! I've been busy!), I'm happy to report back the results. The four questions in the survey as follows:
Location
How often do you communicate web analytics data to your executives?
How is this data communicated?
Is the frequency and type of data communicated meeting your needs?
I'll step through each of the responses and provide brief commentary where applicable.
I recently completed an enormous effort in analytics. We launched a series of tests some weeks earlier and it was time to make an account for it all. One of the happy agonies of using a robust analytics tool is that you can look at the data from hundreds of different angles, each shedding a slightly different light on the subject. Anyway--I just wanted to make a case for stepping back and overlaying the tests on the big picture, rather than focusing purely in the world of each individual test.
I found myself doing the opposite. I started within each of the test's little spheres: splitting our KPI's into the Test vs. Control group. From there I started dicing it up--what about people's immediate reaction to the test? Their latent reaction? What about people who engaged with the content vs. those who just saw the pages, or navigated past them?
Using this method, I produced hundreds of reports, then distilled my research into forty or fifty slides, then again mashed those down to a couple of summary and recommendation slides for each of the six tests we had running.
I sat on the finished analysis for a few days before I would formally present them to the group. Then I remembered to look at the big picture. What were our overall trends in the business? When I looked at those graphs, I was able to say everything that I had learned in those hundreds of reports with two simple graphs: the overall sales lines and lead gen lines. And once I looked at them, I said out loud: "Well, duh!" What we were achieving with our test wasn't what we wanted, but it was suddenly obvious what effect it was having and why.
So my advice to myself: don't get lost in the details. Better to start with the big picture instead of including it as an after-thought.
POSTED BY: April Wilson
POSTED ON: Apr 21, 2008 5:15:25 AM Comments (0)
Are you or do you know somebody connected to the IAB? The WAA needs a panelist!
Measurement Panel – Website, Advertising and Audience May 4, San Francisco 4:30-5:00 - WAA introduction and overview 5:00-6:00 - Panel Discussion: Web Analytics & Online Audience Measurement 6:00-7:30 - Raucous Caucus Networking Event and Reception
In conjunction with the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, the Web Analytics Association is hosting a panel on the differences between the metrics used by advertisers and the metrics used by web jockeys. I, of course, know all about the web side and was looking for somebody who might be willing to represent the IAB in San Fran, the same way we did this a few weeks ago in Toronto.
Here's the description:
WAA Measurement Panel – Website, Advertising and Audience Confused about the number of customers visiting your website? Are the metrics reported by your web analytics tool different from the metrics reported by your online media, or by audience measurement organizations? The WAA invites eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit attendees and the local San Francisco business community of web marketers, publishers and agencies to attend this community meeting. A panel of experts will discuss the value of the metrics, methods and tools used by web analytics practitioners, online advertising media and audience measurement organizations. Find out how-to use these metrics and tools to better understand your customers, your website’s competitive standing and overall website value.
If you know an expert - or are one - please get in touch!
As part of this ongoing series of posts on communicating analytics data, I launched a survey back in February to see how web analytics professionals are communicating with their executive teams. I'm going to step through the entire survey results in my session at eMetrics Canada before unveiling on this blog, but it turns out that most of the respondents communicate site visitor analytics on a weekly or monthly basis. This seems like an entirely reasonable span of time, but does it work for all KPIs? What about your most important metrics? How many times have your executives come to you out of cycle for a daily update — even when they'll be getting an update at the end of the week?
Ambar Shrivastava, the Chief HitTail Analyst at (oddly enough) HitTail, is tasked with driving registrations. If you're not familiar with HitTail, they provide a free, real-time service that tells which keywords are driving visitors to your site. HitTail also has a premium paid version, and, in a nutshell, those two offerings lead to Ambar's primary metrics:
Number of registrations
Number of paid registrations
Number of visitors to the website (and subsequent conversion rate)
He regularly communicates a number of other data points, but those are the primary points of interest to his CEO (and the success of the program). Ambar created a real-time ticker to report on just those 3 data points. That way, executive management could access their most important KPIs at any given point without tataking up any of Ambar's time. If they have other reporting questions, he can still manually pull some numbers for them, but this gives the executives exactly what they the majority of the time — without any added complexity or information they don't need.
It has an added monitoring benefit as well — if he didn't see any signups for 3 hours, he might know something is wrong with the registration system. If he sees a huge spike, he might know it's time to start shopping for a vacation home in the Hamptons.
At my employer, some ancillary data, like web site visits and number of documents read, are batched and updated every 24 hours in our web analytics tool and data warehouse. My primary metrics, like registrations and eCommerce purchases, are accessible real time through our CRM tool. Accessing information in real time allows our executives to get their ROI and financial fix whenever they want. Combined with a scheduled, more in-depth reporting, this has drastically reduced the amount of time I spend responding to one-off data requests.
The more we as analysts can do to push information or make information accessible to our stakeholders, the more time we'll have to work on strategic, actionable recommendations based on the data. If you give them access to the information they want, you can optimally put together scheduled reports of the data they need (even if they don't know it).
I have come across a couple of discussions about measuring User Generated Video Content recently, and thought I would share them with members.
From Mashable -- YouTube! has recently announced that they will begin to offer a set of tools to its publishers to access "more granular metrics", beginning in the second and third quarters of this year.
In the short term, they are focusing on being able to personalize the user experience by classifying video content as being of interest to country-specific sites. The author speculates that this is personalization is in pursuit of being able to generate more targeted (therefore premium) ad revenues.
The paper outlines possible metrics for determining user engagement with online video and multimedia content, and is sponsored by Nedstat. You can download it for free using the link above.
Interestingly, both of these sources seem to focus more on providing metrics to the commercial publisher, who is leveraging Web 2.0 technologies as a means to achieve mass distribution for their premium content or advertising messsages, rather than as a tool to understand the user patterns of individuals sharing content, or self-organizing communities.
To me, it raises the question, where do the self-organizing niche communities that define web 2.0 fit into the commercial model of the future? Will they get squeezed out of their own revolution?
I'm worried about it too... but not enough to stop me from "deleting" my own cookies!
Join me in my madness... Come join the WAA for a "cookie deletion" event at SES New York
If you're going to be at Search Engine Strategies New York on the first day - March 17 - come join us at 3:15, right after the Web Analytics: Measuring Success seminar. We're having a Cookie Deletion Event (come eat and delete!) to meet potential new WAA members (and greet current members!) right there in that room. Everyone is welcome - members and potential members. If you feel comfortable doing so, please wear your WAA pin (do you have one?) and maybe even take a piece of literature at the door, so that you can tell non-members about your WAA pride. And if you just want to come eat cookies, that's okay too. If you need a 15% discount code to SES New York, you can get one on our discount page.
Where: New York Hilton, in the same room as the SES Analytics event When: Monday, March 17, 3:15 pm What: Cookie Deletion Event (come eat and delete)
The WAA is having a membership networking event after the Search Engine Strategies analytics panel. This will be a short event during a break in the day. Current members of the WAA are invited to informally talk to potential new members. Everyone is invited and there is no charge.
The event is a cookie deletion event, not only because deletion of "cookies" -- web analytics software -- is a much-discussed issue in the industry, but also because the WAA will be serving real cookies that day.
Today, at SMX in the Santa Clara convention center, I stood for a while talking to analysts June Dershowitz and Avinash Kaushik. Later at dinner, June told me that two or three people came up to her while we were talking and asked, "Do you guys work together?"
"You know," June mused, "To the rest of the world, it probably does look like we work together. Maybe we do work together. We collaborate and it really is our job to work together."
As I wrote this post, I used the word, "coopetition." June reread it and pointed out that I had a typo, didn't I mean cooperation? No, I really meant coopetition, and showed her the word in Wikipedia (mostly in an effort to figure out how to spell the verb, to coopetate.) Because isn't that what we do, compete for business and cooperate in our efforts to teach the world about web analytics (and to learn it ourselves?)
Tonight I was thinking on how wonderful it is to have the WAABlog, this blog, and how WAA Members can post it, all they have to do is request an account and follow the Web Analytics Association Blog Terms of Service.
But there's another way you could post as much as you want, whenever you want. Really? Yes. How?
1. point your browser to http://waasocial.webanalyticsassociation.org
2. join WAASOCIAL, upload a photo and any media you have that's analytics related. Remember to fill out the profile as best you can as, down the line, we'll be building a recommendations type engine and the profile information will be needed.
3. Go to the blog section of WAASOCIAL and start a new blog post entry:
And here's a blog widget - and your blog post can also appear on it and be spread all over the internet.
Like I said, easy as pie - just visit WAASOCIAL, join and the rest just follows.
