With Toronto, and it’s rain, well behind me (or at least very much to the west of me), I felt I should write about my overall feeling of eMetrics and my thoughts of web analytics’ future. Warning: Possible CLM ahead.

Web analysts agree

If there was a common thread throughout the early sessions of eMetrics, it was this: everyone agrees. Lots of nods and “uh huh”s throughout the room. “Start small”, “think about business goals”, “learn to communicate effectively”, “avoid puke” - yes, yes, yes and oh my yes. They were giving out Avinash’s latest book - but I had a strong feeling that a good proportion of the room already owned a copy, I know I did. The entire conference was dancing on the edge of preaching to the choir. “Test, and be prepared to change”. Yes. “It’s not about the tools”. Yes. Web analytics is here and will thrust business into the new world! Hooah! The Spartans of 300 we were. United in thought, united in action.

Sure. There were tidbits of new material. A method of analysis perhaps we didn’t think about. And, of course, there was the contradicting ideas where some say that web analytics is hard and those that felt that web analytics is easy (I’ll weigh in on this debate on day). Though, mostly everyone agreed that web analytics could be way more complicated - just ask the predictive analytics panel.

But overall, unfortunately, for the first two days, eMetrics felt… dare I say, monotonous?

For the first two days, as interested as I was, there was a lack of fire. It felt like each presentation was a slight flavor of the last. Missing was any serious opinion about social media as a marketing channel (other than a way to hold a contest or campaign). Missing was how to tangibly measure engagement. Missing was any talk about pushing the envelope into offline media’s turf. I started to wonder what happened to the visionary spirit of web analytics? Did Peter Pan grow up when I wasn’t looking? When did we stop dreaming and putting out wild ideas out there for people to shoot down? Where was the passion? Perhaps my expectations were set too high. Who knows… at least the beer was cold, I guess.

Thank God it’s Friday

But just as the conference was beginning to feel old shoe, comfortable but ordinary, Friday came to save the day. While the attribution panel was, by far, the most exciting session of the conference for me, it was the final panel that day that made the conference worth coming to. The overarching question posed to the panel of web analytics’ answer to rock-stars: “What is the future of web analytics?”. No one knew. They had ideas, but no one was sure. There was no across the board agreement. There wasn’t a, “I have nothing to add” to be heard. The time flew by and you wanted to hear more. There was a sense that the field come to a fork in the road, and no one had a map.

Would web analytics be drafted into service by business analytics? Would our opinions ever hold weight with the c-suite? Would we live in the basement with the statisticians or in the limelight in front of CEOs? So many questions, so few answers. Yet, being lost never felt so good.

I’ve always felt uneasiness about the future was the cornerstone of any serious profession and that all good ideas are born from a million bad ones. Proper professions always look for ways to be pertinent and meaningful, not only for today but for our children’s tomorrows. Web analytics is just too young to know all the answers already and much too young to know what it should be when it grows up or what not to do.

I left the session pensive with my head full of questions. It couldn’t have ended better.

My take

While, I too cannot predict the future, after some thought, I come up with this: We can do better. We can do more. We must start now.

As web analysts, we have a great opportunity ahead of us. The tortured history of BI does not have to be that of web analytics. We can learn from BI’s mis-steps. We’re the pioneers in a new medium and we’re much more nimble than our predecessors. The old marketing channels are stumbling and are lusting over the potential of the web - we must leverage this. Instead of us aiming to join their aging clubs, we should be paving the way towards a new league of measured media. We should further blur the boundaries of web, print, radio and TV and look beyond the click towards offline. While perhaps web analytics will be part of BI one day, it doesn’t mean it should be a minor player. Web analytics practitioners must not become the modern day number crunchers or Javascript grunts - we’re better than that.

We will make mistakes and that’s OK. Our mistakes will make us better. We will overcome challenges. This will give us confidence. We will make a difference. And this will give us purpose.

Who’s with me? Hooah.

As I’m writing this post I can hear a church bell ringing from outside my hotel room. The rings, one after the other, are giving me a sense of urgency - a feeling that I have to jot down my thoughts as soon as I can before they fade slip away into the  nothingness that usually accompanies a good night’s sleep. So while I can still type with some sort of eloquence, I’d like to share some of my main take-aways from the first two days at eMetrics Toronto.

Now, keep in mind, none of this information is necessarily new or game-changing. In fact, much of it I’ve heard and read before from blogs and forums. But to hear it live, alongside peers, definitely gives it a new twist. And having the opportunity to hear stories about implementations gone bad and victories long forgotten, definitely adds that needed colour that the worlds of analysts often lack - helping us feel like we’re not alone in our data-crunching fortresses of solitude. Here are my top three take-ways thus far:

Don’t measure what you are not prepared to change - paraphrased from John Blackmore, IBM

I think this one will be a tough one to follow, but in a way I think there is some weight to this suggestion. I say this is tough because it is so “easy” to capture so much data about web interactions. Why not capture this event or that event? Why not capture this action or that action? Why not capture all of it… just in case? Half of me is this just in case kind of guy.I’ll be the first guy to admit that I’ve definitely forgotten a thing or two during my career, so having captured some data “just in case’ is like having a safety net. So I completely understand that view. However, how I understand this advice is that we shouldn’t “be lazy”.

Here me out. As consultants or analysts, if we simply capture data, just in case, we stop being part of the solution and revert to simply being data-collectors and *shiver* report generators. As professionals looking to find root problems we need to always be applying the scientific method, testing hypotheses, creating issue trees and generating insight. Our data collection, ideally, should be purposeful and targeted. Furthermore, there is another wonderful nuance to this bit of advice, being “prepared to change”. This implies there is buy-in to act on insight. This implies that there is an impetus for change. This means that what is measured matters in some tangible way to something that matters.  Brilliant.

The web is just another marketing medium - again, paraphrased from John Blackmore, IBM

This is something that I preach all the time to whomever will listen. As much as I’d love to think that the web channel is a different animal, in the end, it’s just another marketing medium with its own intricacies. It won’t be long until web analytics reports will be lumped in with other campaign results. Also, speaking towards that last point, as Andrea Bertone from 360Training.com alluded to, to make analytics reports better accepted by upper management, take a cue from the reports from the other lines of business and/or channels. The web is a viable communications and revenue channel and, as such, it should stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the business channels. Having analytics reports in line with those of other business channels in terms of look, language and types of insights, will go a long way towards gaining web analytics the respect it deserves. This reporting discipline is something I strongly suggest that all web analytics professionals take because it’s only a matter of time before it’s forced upon us anyways.

People’s behaviours are similar regardless of the channel - paraphrased from  Paul Tyndall, RBC

There is this notion that people behave differently depending on the touch point or channel a user is interacting with. While it’s true that the individual actions may differ - the behaviour doesn’t necessarily change. For instance, if I was an overly aggressive person, I would slam doors and yell on the phone. Different actions, yet the same behaviour: aggressiveness. While I appreciate it will take some time to categorize web behaviours according to matching offline behaviours, it definitely is something to work towards and it is something worth investigating and leveraging.

Despite my having page after page of illegible scribbles for what I like to call notes, I think these three messages stuck with me most so far and I’m hoping to learn more tomorrow. Until then… hmmm, I forgot what I forgot what I was saying - I guess it’s time for ….zzzzzzzzz