The main presenters each had 20 minutes to provide 10 tips on whichever topic they were presenting on. All the presenters finished on-time and provided a ton of great tips across a wide variety of topics including:

• Social Analytics
• Monetizing Facebook
• Building an Integrated Listening Environment
• Mobile Strategy
• Tag Management Systems
• Creating a Data Driven Organization
• Turning Around your Web Analytics Program
• Improving your Vendor Relationship
• Building a Great Digital Measurement Team

After the main speakers concluded, it was time for the Super Accelerator session. Each Super Accelerator had 5 minutes to focus on one point/topic. The final one of the day was the best (and the speaker won a prize) by doing his entire presentation in rhyme. Some of the topics covered by the Super Accelerators included:

• Stop Being a Report Monkey
• The Rarity of a True Web Analyst
• Sharing the Story Behind the Data
• Competitive Facebook Analytics
• Web Analytics Career Development
• Learning to Say No
• Having Unconditional Love for Customers, Co-Workers and Vendors
• Media Fragmentation
• Benefits of “Freemium” Analytics Tools
• Mobile Analytics
• Tracking User Behavior while Respecting their Privacy

Here are my top five learnings from the fire-hose of data I was doused with at this conference:

1. It’s not just about web analytics anymore, it’s about digital measurement (web, mobile, social media, who knows what’s next?)
2. When marketing on Facebook, use ads, not the wall on your company page. The wall is for engaging with your followers.
3. Data is dirty. Get over it!
4. When working with vendors, do not assume they can read your mind!
5. As consumption of digital content via mobile devices increases, mobile analytics is becoming increasingly critical.

So what to do, when you make a mistake – especially when it comes to your analytics reports? You can try some creative explaining when the inevitable questions come from the clients in the vain hope of retaining your credibility, or you can be honest, come clean, and clear up the errors.

In the long run your credibility will suffer a lot more if you cover up your mistakes – eventually someone will catch on and then your credibility will really be out the door, along with your client.

Your client knows that you’re human and therefore subject to the occasional mistake just like the rest of us. If you’re honest about it, and fix it at the same time, you will retain your client’s trust and respect. Yes it’s embarrassing when you make mistakes – but just remember everyone makes them and covering them up just ends up eventually biting you in the derriere.

One of my mottos: Honesty is always the best policy.

Why is the traffic as high as it is? Why are some sections getting more traffic than others? Why did traffic on that one page spike so high last week?

Now if there are no external campaigns being pushed and all the traffic to the site is organic, the answer to these questions lies somewhere within the data. You just have to look for it. For example perhaps the top referring domain for that page with the traffic spike happens to be twitter.com – aha! Someone posted a link on twitter and that drove some traffic. A quick look at the numbers should tell you what % the Twitter traffic was compared to overall traffic to the page. If it’s 25% or more you can bet that twitter post had something to do with the spike.

Now however let’s say your client is engaging in external campaigns. However you have run into a number of problems along this front:

1. The client fails to share with you their media plan, and therefore you have no idea what campaigns are coming down the pike.
2. When the client does ask for the impact of a campaign the proper tracking may not have been implemented and therefore you just don’t have the data to back up any assertions.

The only thing that you can do at this point is try and get tracking implemented for future reports (although once you miss the window of opportunity when a campaign first launches, you may never regain it and really understand the full impact the campaign had on traffic).

The other thing you must do is impress upon your client how critical it is that you are made aware of the media plan ahead of the launch so you have the context to do insightful analysis, and so you can work with the campaign team to make sure all the proper tracking is set up in the campaign before the launch.

If the client fails to realize the importance of this collaboration, make sure you spell out in your reports exactly why you cannot clearly answer “why” to many of the questions surrounding the data because, to put it simply …. you lack the relevant data.

For whatever reason, organizations seem to think that web analytics is a part-time job. Something anyone can do on the side of whatever their real job is. That’s how my former employers treated the situation and naturally I was the one who ended up with web analytics as my “side job”. I saw the fantastic possibilities in the data, but I was constrained in how much time I had to really think about what I was seeing. Most of the time I was relegated to just pumping out reports and then getting back to my “real job”. That was not web analytics.

I’m not sure that organizations see the true value of web analytics, or have an appreciation of what a time-consuming job it can be, when done thoroughly and properly. Of course part of the job will always be to generate and provide reports, but without the context and time to do true analysis – what’s the point? Sure you can ooh-and-aah over the pretty charts and graphs (especially if the trends are up), but what does it mean? Is an up-trend always good? Depends on the context. And without the time to do analysis there is no context to apply to these reports.

So to answer this posts question: “Does your Organization need a Full-Time Analyst?”. My answer would be a resounding “Yes!”.

We were using the same search engine (Google) and the exact same keywords, however the results were varied. This struck me as very odd until I realized there was one crucial difference – I was searching Google on an Ubuntu installation, while they were searchinng on Windows (we were all using FireFox). I tried an experiment – searched for the same keywords on my Windows system, Ubuntu system, and for good measure on Google Mobile on my Blackberry as well.

Not surprisingly the results were slightly different each time. there were about 5-6 URLs that were consistently in the top 10 across each operating system and device, although in different orders, and 4-5 URLs that were not the same across each.

My only thought is that this is one of the side-effects of the new Google Universal Search that was rolled out in May. Google seems to be taking into account which operating system or device you are using when offering up search results, presumably based on what Google feels is most relavent for you (and relavence can change depending on if you are a hard-core Linux user, a casual Windows user, or someone who does all their browsing via their iPhone or Blackberry.)

Now how does this affect your SEO efforts? Plenty since before you just had to optimize your site so people could find you via Google. Now you have to worry about if you are optimzing for relavence across different operating systems and devices as well.

The news is not all bad – you just need to take a step back and come to an understanding that its ok not to be in the #1 spot in the search results all the time. Focus on your core target audience – which operating system or device(s) are they most likely to be using? Optimize for those, and don’t worry as much about the rest. The folks who are not part of your target audience are also more likely to contribute to your home page bounce rate anyway (because they realized your site is not the one they wanted and just up and leave).

Also its recommended that you have a variety of testing environments available to you so you can see for yourself where your site is appearing in the search rankings. Knowing is always half the battle!

Sometimes such a request comes in and I’m swamped and have to push back and reprioritize. Other times I’m less busy and could easily accomodate the request ahead of schedule. However the question is – should I? Here’s my dilemma: if I accomdate last minute requests (that could have easily been requested day or even weeks earlier), does that set up an expectation in my clients that I will always be able to do so? But if I purposely delay providing the data even when I am able to do so immediately, is that ethical?

In the past I was always the one who dropped everything to accomodate such “emergency” requests, only to end up working until the wee hours of the morning in order to meet all my other deadlines that day. That pattern had to stop and when I was very busy I learned to push back and ask what the priority of the request really is in order to prioritize projects more effectively.

This approach works well when I’m very busy, but there are times when there is a lull in activity and its much easier for me to accomodate “emergency” requests. However this always seems to backfire – once my clients get used to my responsiveness during a lull, they are much less understanding when the lull is over. If I had a nickel for everytime someone said to me “but last week you turned around my request in 30 min, why is it taking so much longer?”

I have tried delaying my delivery of people’s requests to account for the kind of turn around they might expect when I’m busier, but that does feel a tad unethical.

Ultimately there is no right answer – if anything I’ve learned that clients can’t be trained to think about such requests ahead of when they actually need them – they will continue to wait until the last minute and come to you in a big rush begging for a quickly turned out report.

The blogs are written from an Omniture slant and WebTrends, Coremetrics and Google Analytics customers may not get as much out of the blogs as Omniture clients will, but there are some great blogs here that are not completely Omniture-centric and so the blogs are definitely worth a read by anyone interested in online marketing related topics.

Here are some examples:

• On-site Targeting: Not Just for the Big Guys
• SEM Tactic #1: Refining Keyword Bidding
• The Consolidating Publisher Market and You
• Big Changes in AdWords, and the Need to Instrument SEM Campaigns

Happy Reading!

To that end I’d like to define these terms to help further understanding:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. This is the practice of optimizing a web site so that it appears higher in search engine results and, hopefully, results in more organic traffic from search engines (this means people searching and finding your site in the normal list of results and clicking on the link – instead of a paid ad). There are many techniques used to do this but in the end there are no guarantees.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing. This is the practice of using search engines to market your company, products, or services. This is done by paying for search keywords so that your web site link comes up on the search engine results page as a paid ad. There is more to it then that but that’s the basic idea behind it.

Online Marketing – This is the practice of marketing your company, products or services online instead of through more traditional media (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio). The biggest mistake I think people make with Online Marketing is to assume it works the same way as other media. Online Marketing, I believe, requires a different approach and at least a basic understanding of the internet and world wide web.