Emetrics Summit

In the continued quest to enhance my analytic abilites and find meaningful employment in the internet industry, I attended the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco last week.

It's a very expensive conference, and since I am a student (well, technically I JUST graduated!!!! Hooray!!!!), I finagled a position as a student volunteer from the very kind permission of conference organizer Matt Findlay. He and Cliff Cobb are British fellows from Rising Media, and they host the conference in a few locales in the US and Europe throughout the year.

Because I was working the conference, I was unable to attend all the session I would have liked, but the ones I did see were so very helpful and enlightening. Among the highlights were Operational Design by Cathy Parish of Fry (about developing a process to your analytics program); Measuring by the Mission by Tim Hart of J. Paul Getty Trust (about developing metrics for sites that are not market based); Distinguishing Click Frauds from Poorly Performing Ads, by John Marshall of Click Tracks; the "guru session" about competitive analysis, featuring "guru" Avinash Kaushik; The Politics of Web Optimization by Dylan Lewis of Intuit; Data at the Edge, a keynote speech by Seth Romanow that I was sorry to not see all of...

There were many more presentations I just got to parts of because I had some duties calling. Some friends attended session they found very valuable for beginners. I have the slides from these recommended sessions (included in the conference packet). Particularly worth mentioning were P.I.M.P. My Reports and Assembling Your Reporting Toolkit by Jennifer Veesenmyer of Evantage and Erik Kokkonen of Juice Analytics, respectively.

I really appreciated a session that I only got to see part of called Multivariable Optimization: Best Practices in Holistic Conversion Improvement, and was disappointed that the slides were not part of the conference packet, as I had hoped to refer to them at a later time to further study this helpful presentation.

I had no idea how much more there was to analytics other than the actual analyzing. So many topics such as addressing the reporting needs of your clients, how to go from reporting to actual action, how to best manage your data, philosophies on optimization, application of testing strategies, best practices, etc. It was truly an eye opening experience to get this overview of the industry.

During the mixers I was able to gather even more information and was stimulated by the subtle differences in the various industries in which analytics is applied. Plus, the vendor aspect is intriguing to me. I had no idea there were so many vendors competing for analysts' business, each claiming to offer some special perspective or added value. My mind was reeling with ideas each day. It was exhausting, but completely worth it.

While in SF, I was able to visit with my friend's family in Berkeley, Jill and Ray L'Esperance, who were kind enough to put me up for a couple of nights, and also see an old friend from my undergrad days, Rachael Sbuttoni, who is newly married and happily working and living in SF as she has been for several years.

In all, it was a great trip. I am hoping to make the next Emetrics Summit in Washington DC this fall to further pursue my interests in web analytics...hopefully see all the sessions in which I have an interest, although I do not think that's possible, since there are concurrent sessions...