Recap of eMetrics Stockholm 2009

eMetrics in Stockholm gathered less than hundred participants two weeks ago. Main reason for this, by Sandra and Matthew Finlay from Rising Media, was that companies are cutting their traveling costs. Well, those end customers who where on site got really good value for their money because there was constant opportunity to get even personal coaching from several consultants and vendors!

It was really nice to hang around all day (and night) long with top people in the field, including Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, Aurélie Pols, Oliver Schiffers, Steve Jackson, Lars Johansson, Marc Saarde and Gillian Muessig from SEOmoz.org. You can check out my photo slideshow from this event by clicking the picture below.


Jim Sterne opened the whole event with a keynote presentation "Time to shine". To people working daily basis in the field, it's obvious that:

"You can actually create competitive edge with web analytics, or should we rather say web intelligence or business analytics."

But in my mind, for example in Finland, although we have raised awareness of web analytics;

"There are still too many companies tracking visitors and lacking wider view how to get benefits from analytics."

We have planned little bit a web analytics research in Finland with TNS Gallup. I really hope that this research would prove me wrong about maturity level of our customers. Maturity model was also topic of the discussion session during the second day. Personally I really like Stephane Hamel's key success factors and maturity model of web analytics. If you don't know what I'm talking about, maybe you should check out his presentation below.

Web Analytics Maturity Model

View more presentations from Stephane Hamel.

It was nice to hear a brave presentation from Andreas Petterson and future strategy of SAS. I missed Telia's case and Eric Peterson's testing clinic, but it was glad to take part of testing test and presentation of Lars from Mark Red. I shows very clearly that we are only guessing and testing is the only way to really know what works for customers and what doesn't. I beat the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Office or Highest Paid Person's Opinion) but lost to monkey and mom. : )

I was in the panel moderated by Jim Sterne, and because I had to concentrate and think things in English, I can't comment the overall outcomes of the panel session. If you were there, I'm more than happy to hear your comments and feedback. During the Monday afternoon we had a presentation with Lasse Leponiemi about how Valmennuskeskus increased their overall business by 28 % and how they got 95 % of all sales from Internet last year! You can get our presentation (pdf) by clicking the picture below.

Presentations from Per Strid and Steve Jackson were solid as expected, Aurélie Pols replaced Eric Peterson and she completed the idea of competing with web analytics. Her presentation included several good and useful check lists. I really liked the presentation by Lasse Rubin Skov and how Canal Digital improved their business just in four months or so (see his presentation in Danish).

Especially I liked Jesper Åström's presentation of how to combine social media and email marketing. I like Jesper's style to present things and if you're thinking how to measure social media, read my post about it, check out this video from Jesper and stay tuned.

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit - starting next week in Stockholm

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is starting next Monday in Stockholm. First I will attend web analytics round table with my colleagues and friends including Lars Johansson, Marc Saarde, Aurélie Pols and Oliver Schiffers. The panel discussion is moderated by Jim Sterne so I'm in very good company, although I'm not quite sure yet what we are going to talk about... : )

My second appearance will be on Monday afternoon. We will have a presentation together with Lasse Leponiemi about how Valmennuskeskus improved their online business with web analytics. I think this is very interesting customer case so make sure you will be in congress hall A at 15.45.

Eric Peterson will give his keynote presentation "Competing with web analytics" on Tuesday morning at 9.00. I'm pretty confident that presentations from Eric and another web analytics veterans Jim Sterne and Steve Jackson, will be top class also this year at eMetrics. Check out the schedule and see you soon in Stockholm!

Web Analytics Wednesday in Amsterdam - my presentation available

There was +60 attendees last night at Web Analytics Wednesday in Amsterdam. The event was organized by Frans Appels and hosted by Tribal DDB. It was really good to see a presentation from Filip Baardman, e-Commerce Manager from Hotel Management Group. Although it was in Dutch, I got a good picture how they are using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer for multivariate testing and improving conversions.

During the networking session I had a chance to talk with him and asked if they ever had considered paid web analytics solutions. His answer was perfectly in line with this Forrester Research about web analytics solutions in enterprises - they simply don't need those extra features that paid solutions have compared to free tools. Instead, they are looking for a good web analyst but have found it almost as a mission impossible. I had approximately 45 minutes presentation right after Filip. You can get my presentation by clicking the picture below.

If you want more heavy information about brand measurement, read this post from Avinash Kaushik. It was really good to see such an active audience in Amsterdam with several questions during and after presentations. Almost half of the attendees were using Twitter and there was some live tweeting going on during my presentation. Thank you for all those nice comments. It was great to get involved with the Dutch web analytics community. Interesting people and discussions afterwards and couple of beers of course... : )

Web Analytics Wednesday in Amsterdam: sharing cases with the Dutch community

Tomorrow I will be speaking at Web Analytics Wednesday in Amsterdam. I'm really excited about this event and getting in touch with the Dutch web analytics community. First I planned just to visit my friend, but then I found out Frans planning the Web Analytics Wednesday and after a little push I had this opportunity to share couple of stories and my experiences.

Basically my presentation is build around three in depth customer cases:

• Rimmellondon.fi – how they are trying to measure brand awareness, how they should measure sales, how they are starting to monitor their online reputation and how we did first social media tests?
• Talentpartners.fi/tuloksia – how we measured offline and online marketing activities for their (b2b) campaign, what tools were used and what were the outcomes and insights for their business?
• Atelier Goldner Schnitt – optimizing their e-commerce and increasing revenue by 29 %. What different kind of decisions and actions were made in very short time and with challenging organization structure? Why we wanted to decrease a conversion rate?

I will mention shortly couple of other customer cases as well, and can't actually leave the stage without mentioning a word or two about my favourite subject – multi-/cross-channel behavior and measuring. Finally I will audience about voice of customer and share my opinions about best practices and trends in Finland.

If you're reading this and coming on site at Tribal DDB in Amstelveen, don't hesitate shoot your question or feel free to catch me after the presentation. I will have couple days off before eMetrics Summit next week in Stockholm so I will have some time to spend in this cool city. Stay tuned, subscribe tomy RSS feed or follow me at Twitter to know when my WAW Amsterdam presentation and recap is available here for you.

How to measure Social Media - Recap of MindTrek

Very good social media presentations by Chris Messina, David Coleman, Maria Pienaar, Kaija Pöysti, Teemu Arina and panel discussions at MindTrek on Thursday inspired me to write this recap. First of all I have to admit that social media is very complex! Like (human) relationships usually are...

For those who don't know anything about social media (and believe me, there's plenty of those people in companie's top management at the moment), you can read Wikipedia's description but more simple definition could be:

"Social media can be compared as traditional word of mouth."

Traditionally you didn't have a chance to participate if there was at least two people talking about your company. These conversations, like everything else, has moved to web and people are using different kind of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, IRC Galleria just to name few. Now companies, read people in companies, can participate these conversations.

Well, should you? Some companies in Finland have banned e.g. Facebook for their employees. Instead, our government has created rules how to participate these discussions. To me, it's like top management of the company is saying don't talk anything about our company.

"Platforms in web are just one media, banning one media doesn't end conversations what so ever."

In bad and in good, these platforms and discussions can be really powerful. What earlier took some time with mouth to mouth, now can explode to thousands and thousands of people in just a fraction of time.

"Every company should be worried about their online reputation."

If you or your boss need some facts, take a look at Alexa's list of top sites in Finland. At this time there are approximately 1,3 million people in Facebook who live in Finland! Every fourth Finn is in the Facebook and the website is second in in Alexa's list right after Google.fi search.

It's not my responsibility if you decide to turn your back to all these people who are talking about you and your brands all the time. Weilin + Göös, a publisher, is resigning 55 people out of 67. They claim that one of the reasons was a change in customer behaviour. Well, it obviously didn't happen over a night and I think that top management was totally lost with understanding their customers. In my mind:

"Companies don't have an option anymore whether to use social media or not."

But I truly understand that we would like to measure how effective social media is? Coming back to the complexity of social media, I have to say that measuring will be hard and complex as well. But we can try to measure and understand better social media usage.

"Worst thing you can do is jump right off to some social media platform without any planning."

First question you should ask yourself is "why are we doing this"? Actually from measuring point of view this is very relevant question to any marketing activities you may have. By answering that question you can easily define your key performance indicator for your efforts. It can be improved customer satisfaction, better brand awareness, more sales and well...you name it. I think you already know "how to measure these outcomes"? For example you can use surveys, top of mind researches and your online/offsite sales.

"Measuring social media is always multi-/cross-channel measurement task."

With the big picture in mind, hell you can even try measuring social media ROI, you have to measure also social media micro goals. Here is a list of KPI examples you could use:

• number of followers or individual/group members
• number of new sign ups or sign up ratio in certain timeframe
• number of posts, comments, etc. = conversation rate
• number of negative/positive posts, comments, etc.
• viral effect of your message/offer over time

You have to include these metrics to your onsite KPIs (I hope you have them already in place?). Here's couple of free tools you can use to collect more data:

• Google Alerts: track your company and your brands & competitors
• Google Insights and Trends: track any search phrase trends over time
• Google Keyword Tool: track demand of any search phrase over time
• AddThis: track how your content is shared to social media services
• TinyURL: create short URLs to your site including tracking code
• Feedburner: track your RSS feed consumption
• and there are plenty more platform related tools, e.g. Twitalyzer

Got comments, new ideas, something you want to share or argue with? Feel free and leave a comment! You can learn more, shoot a private questions to my email or follow me at Twitter (@mertanen). Finally a funny parental video about Facebook: you can learn this platform through your kids! : )