visioactive

I’m finally back in the office after enjoying a wonderful 2 weeks in California at Emetrics in San Francisco and the Visul Sciences User conference in Sandiego. Now after spending a few days catching up on all the reading I missed I’m finally getting back to blogging. Sorry for the delay!

There have been a lot great posts on Emetrics in the past couple weeks. There were a number of good presentations and big announcements. I don’t want to duplicate coverage too much this far after the fact but I do want to mention 2 of my favorite presentations and my biggest personal take away from the conference.

Favorite Presentations

My favorite presentation of the conference was Jodi McDermot’s (of InPhonic) discussion on optimizing landing pages and display ads. She gave some very practical examples about how she uses the power of real-time analytics to get the most out of their display advertising when the ads are running instead of just doing performance review after the fact.

Through evaluating and comparing ads as they are running and optimizing accordingly, Jodi has achieved what many are still struggling with, a real dollars and cents ROI for InPhonic’s analytics investment. This is a point that I feel sometimes gets lost in a lot of the analytics discussions. Great analysis and better understanding of the consumer are important but at the end of the day, how much of what you do can be attributed to improving the bottom line.

If you are looking for advice or ideas for how to make a similar impact on your organization I would highly recommend checking out her presentation if you have to opportunity to see her give it again in the future.

My next favorite presentation of the conference was by Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution. His perspective as a cultural anthropologist, while not necessarily focused on web analytics, contained a wealth of insight about how we humans perceive things.

From learning the percentage of communication that is nonverbal to understanding the difference presenting my left cheek can have on an interaction and much more, I went away from his talk with a list of things to think about not only for web analysis and marketing but for life in general.

I highly recommend checking out their site as well as his upcoming book.

Biggest Take Away

As a blogger and a consultant, my biggest take away of the conference was the need more practical examples of how to do web analysis. I know Robbin has been calling out for help in generating more “newbie” content for a while now. Gary Angel also made similar comments on the percentage of practitioner examples. Beyond them, the desire for more down on the ground, get your hands dirty, examples of analysis was definitely a prevailing theme with a number of the practitioners I spoke with. Something I am going to do my best to keep in mind as I go back through my ever growing list of tings to blog about.

Bloggers Round Table Video

If you haven’t checked it out yet. Rene also posted the videos of one of the bloggers tables from the birds of a feather lunch. (I’m the one sitting to the left of Eric Peterson)

-Ian