eMetrics Wrap-up: Am I A Psychic Marketer?
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Yesterday, I started checking to see if my predictions about the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit were right or wrong. Today, I’m covering the rest of the lot and dashing in some more of my off-the-cuff thoughts.
Prediction #3: The WebTrends - Omniture Arms Race Will Continue
I thought, perhaps, that Greg Drew was going to use his presentation to announce something new and exciting at the high end, enterprise level world of analytics tools. That wasn’t the case, though my sneaking suspicion that it might just be a slick discussion of ML2 (their new suite of tools) turned out to be right. I’ll call this one a draw or a draw/wrong. You can check out my full recap of Greg Drew’s presentation over at Search Marketing Gurus (the full list of our liveblogged posts is right here).
I do think the Marketing Score portion of the suite is interesting. Basically, you define different scores that make sense for your business model. Take a car company - you could have a score that gathers data about a visitors interest in safety, another for SUVs, another for mileage, etc. You consider the ways you want to profile and segment your audience and create a score. Once you’ve conceptualized the scores, you then choose actions on your site that will contribute to a visitor’s score and weight them: downloading a spec sheet = 100, watching a video = 75, etc. The score(s) of an audience inform additional on and off-site targeting. It’s a lovely theory and marketing presentation, but I can’t validate how well the rubber meets the road.
Prediction #4 - Robots Take Over eMetrics, Long Live Automated Optimization!
I thought that automating of tasks and calculations would be a big theme this year. I was definitely wrong on this front. Multi-variate testing (MVT) vendors still had a strong showing. However, I did not see many large or niche vendors bringing in additional tools to help automate tasks. I would hope that more of the tools might make it easier to index your results against your own past performance or continue to advance data visualization and discoverability. Frankly, it’s still very much in its infancy.
It’s still too hard to parse through lists and lists of data or charts and flip back and forth between reports to tease out that a-ha moment of truth. Craig, the President and Founder of my employer Commerce360 (site / blog), once called on vendors to create a platform that lets third party developers make their own data visualization and manipulation apps to plug into the analytics tool. Can you possibly imagine the speed and depth at which that would change how we think about discovering and reporting on data? Even beyond just visualization, I did not see many vendors putting forward tools to simplify and automate routine or mathematically challenging tasks.
Prediction #5 - Actionability Will Continue to Rule The Day
This was was right, naturally. Alright, this wasn’t a long shot prediction, I mean Avinash was speaking. Have you read the guy’s blog or book? The actionability drum was beaten again and again by Eric Peterson, Jim Sterne and a host of other speakers. What actually struck out to me this year was how forcefully each speaker came down on the need to run tests. In their eyes, a/b and multivariate testing are the price of entry for actionable web analytics. I had a lot of casual conversations over lunch and drinks and I estimate that less than 20% of the people I spoke with had ever done a multivariate test or were currently running one.
How do we close the testing gap? First, it’s definitely got to start with a lot more education. Awareness from the bottom up and support and budget from the top down. That means white papers, webinars, articles, webcasts, conference presentations, etc. Second, we all need to push for one proof of concept test to win the money and time we need to do more. Third, there needs to be more centralized literature and training out there for people to familiarize themselves with the concepts, best practices and technical elements of testing. Perhaps the Web Analytics Association needs a testing panel, some entrepreneurial person could start a free repository of info or the UBC could offer a website optimization certificate. If it’s MVT today, it’ll be behavioral targeting tomorrow. Let’s lay the foundation now.
Thus concludes my prediction recap from eMetrics. I didn’t do too shabby if I do say so myself. Keep reading in the coming days for additional thoughts about eMetrics and don’t forget to check out my coverage at Search Marketing Gurus. If this is your first visit to my blog, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed.
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