TechTableTalk: "It's Not Over Your Head"

On any given Wednesday, a group of Web Analytics professionals, possibly dressed in black slacks and t-shirts, are meeting at various locations around the world.

Whether that location is Copenhagen, London, Toronto, or  San Francisco, you can bet it’s to eat, drink, and talk about whose doing what with cookie, browser, streaming html, or any other kind of data to better understand how users (aka consumers) are spending time on the web. 

According to Eric Peterson,  Web Analytics Wednesdays was begun more than three years ago by June Dershowitz  to give web analytic professionals an opportunity to exchange ideas.

Peterson, CEO and principal consultant of WebAnalyticsDemystified, has written any number of well-respected books on the topic. Working in web analytics since 1998 before anyone really knew it was a field, he serves as a nexus point for many who are now traveling in that space. A little foreshadowing here. This article is not about Eric Peterson. But go to www.webanalyticsdemystified.com to find out more about Peterson, his colleagues, and their work.

I did get to exchange a few words with him at the recent September 9 WAW meeting on the fourth floor of the St. Regis Hotel next to the Museum of Modern Art, not a shabby location.

I was greeted at the door with a nametag and my choice of sparkling water or red or white wine. Upon entry, there was a selection of dim sum with three sauces and a number of cocktail tables where I  was shortly joined by Anna Sebestyen from Budapest, Hungary and Mike who left too quickly for me to obtain his last name. We did talk long enough for me to discover that he had come to San Francisco by way of Minsk and Chicago and now works at Yahoo. 

By this time, the room was packed. Many members of this year’s September 8-11 XChange Conference had shown up and the room was buzzing.

Over the convivial din, Coremetrics, Foresee, Tealeaf, and Teradata, all leaders in the analytics field, gave short presentations about their work. 

So what is Web Analytics?  It’s roughly about understanding how commercial web sites can create a higher percentage of conversions so more of us roll away from our laptops with filled shopping carts.

According to Coremetrics, some of their clients have as much as a 22 percent converstion rate, which is a very good thing. Studying how customers navigate web sites (old fashioned focus group stuff), what array of tools to use to do so, and what corporate management does with the data, seems to define web analytics. 

Talking with me on the patio, Peterson said that he thinks a lot about, “How do I get the CEO at Walmart to care?”

It seems like a growing number of people these days are caring. And the computer industry is doing what is does best—creating a space for an exchange of ideas by people who are in the middle of this thing.

For those of us who aren’t, take my new friend Anna’s advice and see Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/