When we held the first X Change Conference, I leaned heavily on people I knew were doing interesting work to lead Huddles. Five years ago, that meant that nearly all the Huddle Leaders were vendors or consultants. Folks like Matt Jacobs, Jacques Warren, and Matt Belkin (all of whom were awesome by the way - some of the best contributors we've ever had) led Huddles. I did my own share of Huddle Leading that year, but that was the last time; because in Year 2, we instituted a policy that only Enterprise practitioners should lead Huddles. Ever since, I've been limited to participation.
In truth, that's not much of a limitation because as often becomes quickly evident, good Huddle leaders do less talking that some members of their session (sadly it seems from our feedback that we had one Huddle Leader this year who didn't quite get the concept - that happens rarely and you don't get a second chance).
But that limitation fell away, one time only, when we had a Leader cancel on Sunday evening, the day before the Conference kicked-off.
Ouch.
So I found myself, on the first session of the second day, leading a Huddle on "What to do About Bad Data." It was peculiar, after years of telling people "there are no vendors or consultants who lead Huddles at X Change - not even Semphonic" to be leading a Huddle! I plead "No Contest," but with extenuating circumstances.
It was a bit nerve-wracking - more than if I was just doing it as a "regular" leader. On the other hand, as you can probably imagine, I have a LOT of ideas about how Huddles should work.
As anyone who has ever led (or been in) a Huddle can probably attest, it's all about the group. I was lucky with mine. We had a room heavy with hands-on practitioners. I'm going to write up the conversation in some depth in a separate post (and thanks to EVERYONE who participated). It was a treat to lead Huddles again and since I probably won't get another chance for the next couple of years (I really can't root for last-minute cancellations), I'll have to be happy with that.
Next up for me was "Advanced Segmentation & Retargeting" with Michelle Lambert of QVC. Michelle was returning from last year's X Change (as an attendee) where she'd really impressed me in a couple of Huddle's we shared. This is also, as you can imagine, a topic close to my heart.
There were a number of techniques discussed that I thought interesting. Alex Schultz of Facebook described their efforts at "chaining" - getting users to move from one response to another. Facebook does some terrific re-targeting; I know because as a non-regular user (regular non-user?) I'm a fairly frequent recipient of their "re-engagement" efforts. What's the best time to get someone to Add Friends? Right after they've just added a friend.
The best time to target visitors is when they've just done something (particularly something related) with you. This principal is almost universal and it deserves a place in any marketers basic targeting pantheon.
For Facebook, it seems like quickness of response is critical in remarketing. But not every Huddle participant felt their business was that way. Some efforts were more effective with longer lag times between the experience and the retargeting - particularly when users weren't deep in the funnel. There's an obvious testing opportunity here, but I wonder if most organizations have really done good controlled testing (which was another HUGE theme in this discussion) on lag-times. There is no one right answer to the optimum time for follow-up - every business and even each visitor/visit type is probably unique.
Given the concepts of chaining and fast re-targeting, I trotted out one of my standard pieces of analytic remarketing advice. If you're making re-marketing offers, not only do you have to be very careful (because people get very smart, very quickly about this stuff and will soon develop "remarketable" behaviors - not to mention that you MUST do controlled tests), but you should consider that the best time to "remarket" might be before a visitor leaves the funnel. If you can predict the likelihood of funnel abandonment, you will sometimes be better off making your offer in-funnel as opposed to remarketing. Even the best remarketing offer conversion rates will be significantly worse than in-funnel rates - and you make gaming the system more challenging. People spend a huge amount of time re-marketing and that's great. But who spends time optimizing in-funnel abandonment prediction? Almost no one.
Another fascinating topic was on-site retargeting. Dell is doing really interesting (and I suspect very profitable) work here tuning the site experience for return visitors. This is one of the easiest and most impactful methods of targeted marketing in digital analytics and it's a shame more companies don't follow suit. When I'm reaching into my grab-bag of targeting tricks, tailoring the site experiences of return visitors is always high on my list. One of the things we've seen in site after site is that return visitors are highly likely to repeat their behaviors (such as searches) from past visits - making it easy to surface the products or information they need as soon as they land.
Last up for me was Joe Stanhope's (Forrester) Huddle on Mobile Application Measurement. There was quite a bit more (and more advanced) discussion of Mobile measurement at this year's X Change, though it's been a significant topic for a couple years running. This was another Huddle where I did a fair amount of learning, not least from our own Greg Dowling, who knows this stuff cold. It may seem odd to pick up stuff at X Change from a colleague, but Huddles often bring out questions that I wouldn't have thought or even known enough to ask. My own interest in Mobile App Measurement is more on the measurement paradigm (what to measure and how to use it), and that's a subject I have thought a fair amount about. Sadly, I think I'm still waiting for that garden to flower; even the most advanced companies still seem consumed with the technical side of collection and basic reporting around App measurement.
Which brings me to my close. For a person who loves to talk (and write), I'm not much for long speeches. I gave my customary couple-minute close at X Change and then spent 30-40 minutes fielding suggestions and thoughts about the Conference. After that, it was off to the huge Bayside pool for drinks, ice-cream sundae bar (oh how jealous my daughters were), and some last, sun-drenched conversations.
So what's the big picture take-away from having all those top enterprise practitioners talking and sharing their experience?
I see two big changes from prior years. First, there was virtually no discussion of the "Omniture vs. Coremetrics vs. Webtrends" sort that would have been common in past years. That's actually kind of nice. I don't miss it at all.
Second, there was a huge, almost overwhelming consensus that analytics data warehousing is not just the future of Web analytics it's the immediate reality (Theme #1 may well be related to this). This discussion (and real work) was everywhere. The move toward data warehousing is, for the moment, complementary to Web analytics tools. It relies on Web analytics tools for data collection and it has yet to seriously impinge on traditional Web analytics reporting.
How long will that last?
I'm just not sure.
I do know that Web analytics solutions are an expensive way to collect clean server calls. If that's all you're using your Web analytics tool for, you're better off with a different solution. Nor is data collection much of a long-term business model for a big company.
Will the current advantage in democratization of data that Web analytics tools enjoy last or be enough to sustain the market? At really sophisticated organizations like eBay, even that advantage has largely dissipated. But I know, too, that making data readily accessible out of traditional BI and Warehousing systems is NOT easy. Lots of companies have struggled and failed at this. If I were an enterprise vendor, however, I'd stop worrying about GA and start worrying about Hadoop (and the myriad other technologies that facilitate big-data warehousing and analytics).
Right now, it's a race to see whether Web analytics tool vendors can extend their platforms rapidly enough to head-off the migration of their mature client-base to internal or cloud-based warehousing tools. Looking at the landscape of X Change in 2011, that's a race that, while far from over, they seem to be losing.
It really may be the end of the world as we know it.
Do I feel fine about it?
Yes and no. I love the analytic and marketing opportunities that data marts open up. But like most craftsmen, I love the tools I'm using right now as well.
All done? Not quite.
With a few hours of daylight still left, Phil Kemelor led a large group on a biking circumnavigation of the island and Corry Prohens took a group of brave initiates to the ocean side of the island for a surfing session. Would have loved to have done either, but duty, in the form of a call with a Korean client (6:30PM being our traditional APAC meeting hour) summoned. In past years that would have been all she wrote, but this year I had one more day and one more challenge to look forward to. The Non-Profit Analytics Challenge to be exact; that's a story for another day.
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