With Hat in Hand

Meet me in D.C.

I’m going to be in Washington D.C next week. I will not be joining the throngs lining up in front of congressional committees to ask for a bailout or explaining how I managed to lose a few hundred billion dollars.

No, it’s just eMetrics.

If you're like me, you've found it increasingly difficult these past weeks to keep one’s mind on work. I’m not an ardent investor. I don’t flip homes. I don’t pick stocks. I don’t look at the value of my retirement fund more than once or twice a year. Like blog readership numbers, there are some facts I think it’s usually better not to know!

Yet I’m probably getting “mouse-finger” from refreshing my home page to see the latest market news. And like everybody else, I’ve been watching the free-fall and wondering what the long-term impact – when combined with an historic post-bubble housing depression – will be.

This past mid-summer, I was at a conference for financial analysts and investors where I was talking about web analytics companies. One of the analysts asked me if I thought the economy was going to get worse and head into a recession. I managed to laugh and allowed as how things might be heading that way. “But shouldn’t you be telling me?” I asked.

I mean, damn, I’m just a web analyst. Though I suppose I could answer the question now.

So it will be a relief to meet and talk about stuff we actually can control and do know something about. Something other than how much is left in our retirement accounts.

The first presentation I’ll be doing at eMetrics is with one of our clients, Traffic.com. Traffic is part of Navteq, the global mapping and navigation database provider. They run a real-time, public-facing traffic advisory service that competes with Google and Yahoo as well as a host of local providers.

Traffic runs a very substantial PPC program that, until recently was managed by a major agency. They hired Semphonic do a SEM audit of their program as a piece of a larger decision on whether or not to bring their PPC program in-house.

I’ll be co-presenting with Traffic and we’ll talk about their SEM audit, their eventual decision to bring PPC in-house and how it’s working out for them. The presentation has some really interesting aspects to it – not the least of which is the nature of the optimizations that turned out to matter in their business and the implications that had for managing their program. The types of optimization opportunities we found in their program weren’t the run-of-the-mill ones you usually hear about. While many of these optimizations are quite specific to their business, that just underscores the point that every business is unique.  And it’s why conventional wisdom is no substitute for good measurement!

If you are involved in a serious PPC program – and especially if you are considering running a PPC program in-house, this should be a great presentation for you to attend. It’s very meaty and I think you will really enjoy hearing from and talking with the guys from Traffic.

My other presentation is a different sort of beast altogether. I’m going to be walking through the process of doing web behavioral visitor segmentation. Behavioral Segmentation is work that I’m deeply excited about. Along with Analytic Reporting, I think it’s the most interesting work we’ve been doing at Semphonic.  It’s also a topic I wrote about extensively and much of the material from the blog has found its way into the presentation. But I’m also going to be showing some examples of segmentation work and providing more detail into the actual process of building a behavioral segmentation.

Among the topics I’m going to cover are getting and using an Omniture Data Feed, joining and integrating survey data and some samples of segmentation presentation and segmentation reporting techniques.

This is still very cutting edge stuff. Most organizations haven’t done and aren’t doing this kind of work yet. But it’s also a fundamental marketing tool – something that supports every aspect of your online marketing and measurement program. I think it’s only a question of time before every serious online property does this type of analysis as a matter of course.

As always, feel free to contact me if you’d like a copy of the presentations post eMetrics. And if you are going to be there, stop by and say hello! No market talk. No bailouts. God forbid no presidential politics. Just shop.

It will be a pleasure.