X Change 2010 Topics and Conversations

The X Change has a reputation for finding the very best practitioners in the digital measurement market to lead our conversations and huddles and the 2010 event is no exception! Here is a sample of the kinds of content we are offering this year, and keep in mind more huddles will be added. Are you ready to join us at X Change 2010?

Video Analytics: Fitting a Square Peg into a Round Hole

As the Internet continues to evolve and shape society one of the most exciting opportunities facing traditional content providers is the "infinite measurability" of online programming and media consumption. Now savvy media properties and technologists can go deeper than audience samples and focus groups and begin to measure nuanced interactions with multimedia conten ... or can they? Join Shari Cleary, Vice President of Digital Research at MTV Networks and discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with measuring and analyzing online video in this "infinitely measurable" world.

Digital Analytics for Content Sites

Content sites and social networks are among the most trafficked online properties and as a category these sites create a unique set of measurement and analysis challenges. While their base key performance indicators are widely understood, any deeper look at the metrics of content performance become complicated quickly and often create more questions than answers. Join Shari Cleary, Vice President of Digital Research at MTV Networks and discuss her experience at MTV and CBS to create a set of measures that bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds.

Defining and Executing a Global Web Analytics Strategy

Most of us realize that there is far more to web analytics than technology alone, and the best of us have experienced firsthand the complexity inherent in gaining management buy-in to build a world-class digital analytics practice. Fortunately more and more senior management teams are coming around and asking the right questions, so how can you take advantage of the opportunity? Join Lynn Lanphier from Best Buy and discuss how one of the world’s best known consumer electronics retailers is developing a top-to-bottom global strategy for digital analytics and testing.

Digital Analytics for Retailers

Some say that web analytics was designed for online retailers, especially those selling low consideration items or long-tail products, what with their same session conversion and clear outcomes tied directly back to revenue and profitability. But the truth is often not quite as convenient; retailers, especially those with a multi-channel component to their business, experience the same kinds of challenges the rest of us do … only under greater scrutiny and expectations. Join Lynn Lanphier from Best Buy and discuss some of the challenges Best Buy faces with their multi-channel, mobile, social, and global retailing initiatives.

The Big Picture (for Most of Us): Conversion Optimization

When you get past all of the hype and hyperbole most of us are pursuing the same core goal in our digital analytics efforts: we are trying to increase whichever conversion rate we hold most dear to drive the business and demonstrate the value of our work. But, as many of us have already learned, optimizing conversion rates is much harder than just "finding the holes and plugging them." Join Joe Megibow, Vice President of Global Analytics at Expedia.com, and discuss the tools, technologies, and strategies he has deployed to drive his little piece of Expedia’s billion dollar business.

Operationalizing Voice of Customer Insights

We all know that a healthy digital analytics effort includes both qualitative and quantitative data, and most of us have our favorite satisfaction and feedback vendors already in place. One key insight the best companies have when working with qualitative data is that, well, you have to actually do something with it. But how many of us have truly operationalized and integrated those insights across the Enterprise? Not many, but Joe Megibow has. Joe is Vice President of Global Analytics at Expedia.com and he’s solving problems with qualitative data that most people don’t know they have yet. Join Joe and hear how Expedia is opertationalizing Voice of Customer data to their competitive advantage (and how you can do the same!)

Test Yourself Rich! Multivariate and A/B Testing

We’ve all been saying all along that "if you’re doing web analytics but not testing, you’re not really doing web analytics" and clearly, an increasing number of companies have figured this out. But testing is a lot more involved than just getting some technology and slapping it in the page (surprise!) Join Dylan Lewis, Group Manager of Web Measurement at Intuit TurboTax and one of the most respected and sophisticated testing experts in the industry to discuss what is required to build out a truly world-class testing effort.

Analytics for Applications and Intranets

Few would dispute that digital channels are rapidly becoming increasingly important components of our daily lives. Especially when you consider the time savings associated with applications on fixed and mobile platforms --- ranging from online banking, social media, photo sharing sites, and productivity applications, not to mention the multitude of games and mobile apps out there --- one can easily argue that we have entered into the "age of online applications." But who measures those applications, and how do they do it, and what do they get from their measurement efforts? Join Dylan Lewis, Group Manager of Web Measurement at Intuit TurboTax to discuss tagging, tracking, and goal setting for online applications and Intranets.

Mobile Analytics for Apps and Sites

Most of us recognize that mobile is hot and mobile apps are even hotter, but for some reason mobile analytics is still kind of a mess.  Challenges range from the diversity of platforms and devices, to limitations in technology, to offline browsing and proprietary platforms governed by arbitrary rules.  But your boss isn’t going to stop asking for data on the company’s mobile efforts so what can you do?  Learn from Blandon Casenave, that’s what you can do.  Blandon is the Director of Digital Media Research at NBCU and is the man when it comes to measuring the mobile world.  Join him and hear how NBCU has jumped to the head of the class when it comes to mobile analytics and discuss the kinds of challenges that keep Blandon awake at night.  Blandon will discuss the challenges specific to measuring mobile video and the way NBCU has tackled that problem for the past year, server vs browser side measurement and the persistent challenges measuring Blackberry devices and possible solutions on the horizon.

Moving from Short-Term Conversion to Lifetime Value

It's 10 PM, do you know where your lifetime value is? Traditional web analytics techniques focus on gaining visibility into visitor acquisition channels, marketing campaign effectiveness, conversion funnels, and engagement metrics. However, for subscription based sites, the membership lifetime value becomes a critical component in understanding and placing into context traditional web analytics measurements. Join Hila Strong, Senior Analyst at MySpace.com, as she shares her experience analyzing member behavior for one of the leading providers of online personal services, and guides a discussion around the critical steps to approaching analytics projects for subscription sites.

Segmentation and Testing: Diving Deep for Real ROI

Have you become hypnotized by the sexy dashboards in your favorite optimization tool? If so, you are probably leaving ROI on the table. Most dashboards hide underlying gems that can only be harvested through deep segmentation of test results. Join Hila Strong, Senior Analyst, currently at mySpace.com, as she shares her experience uncovering hidden gems in test results for one of the leading providers of online personal services and leads a discussion on what segments are right for your business.

My Dataset is Bigger Than Yours (and That’s a Problem)

Bigger is not always better, but it can be if managed properly. Still, that’s a big "if" when you’re dealing with the petabytes of information flowing into Microsoft, Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Myspace, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo every single day. Not many of us have this challenge, but when you do you do so we’ve asked Bob Page, Vice President of Analytics at eBay and Alex Schultz, TITLE, at Facebook to come lead our huddle on "Big Data and Big Iron." Join this huddle to discuss the problems some of us have today and most of us will have eventually.

The Myth of the "Universal" Tag

Perhaps the most exciting measurement technology on the digital measurement horizon is not a measurement technology at all but a clever piece of middleware designed to facilitate and simplify the data collection process. Erroneously called a "Universal tag" by some, these platforms are essentially content management for tags (tag management systems or TMS). Join Bob Page, Vice President of Analytics at eBay and Kelly Olin, Global Senior Web Analytics Manager at Nike and discuss the technology, concepts, and actual deployment of tag management systems in the measurement sector today.

Managing Measurement for a Global Brand

Brand measurement is hard enough, what with all the soft measures involved and the anonymous nature of the Internet, but what if you were responsible for digital analytics and reporting for a truly global brand? What data would you report on? Who would you report that data to? And what actions would you expect the recipients to take based on analysis that may run counter to your businesses entire brand strategy? Kelly Olin is the Global Senior Web Analytics Manager at Nike, one of the world’s most recognized brands, and these are the questions that keep her up at night. Join Kelly and discuss brand measurement and reporting regardless of your brand’s reputation or reach.

Bringing it All Together: The 360 Degree View in Practice

For years analysts, consultants, and other big-thinkers not actually tasked with any real work have been describing how a truly connected online/offline data warehouse would transform business by providing an end-to-end view of customer lifetime behavior. The quest for this so called "360 degree view of the customer" was started by many but completed by very, very few, but still we search. Cabela’s have completed this quest, and are now conducting sophisticated analysis against their data assets. Join Tony Uhlir, Internet Customer Experience Manager from Cabelas.com, and discuss the creation of this type of data mart and, more importantly, what you can do with it.

Measuring and Monitoring the Social Web

Social media is scorching hot these days catalyzed by the surging popularity and changes and additions to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Flickr, and the hundreds of social startups that pepper the Internet marketing landscape.  But how do you measure the social opportunity given that many of the "best" interactions don’t happen anywhere near your site or application tracking?  Judah Phillips, Senior Director, Global Site Analytics at Monster Worldwide (Monster.com) uses a combination of traditional web analytics and social media listening and engagement platforms to understand the social opportunity afforded one of the world's largest websites.  Join Judah and hear how Monster leverages leading-edge web analytics tools, new-to-market social media platforms, and good old-fashioned patience and perseverance to make heads and tails of the social web.

Web Analytics Staffing Issues

Everybody working in the digital measurement industry is acutely aware of the staffing issue we all face --- there are far too many open positions and not nearly enough truly qualified Senior Analysts to go around.  While there are a handful of efforts in place working to train new analysts, analytics managers across the globe face the ongoing challenge of finding, hiring, training, and possibly weeding out resources coming from diverse backgrounds.  Judah Phillips, Senior Director, Global Site Analytics at Monster Worldwide (Monster.com) has worked with and hired some of the best and has had to make hard choices when rightsizing and course correcting analytics organizations.  Join Judah, regardless of whether you are an analyst, a manager, or someone working to become either and discuss one of the key challenges facing the web analytics sector today.

Cross Platform Analytics and Digital Convergence

Do you remember the good old days when you could be reasonably sure your digital audience was using a computer and nothing more?  With a log file parses and a bit of elbow grease almost anyone could develop an understanding of the reach and behavior of your online audience.  Alas, those days are gone.  Now digital media groups need to consider web, mobile, and increasingly digital TV as part of the consumer interaction equation, forging device agnostic measures of reach, behavior, and propensity to transact.  Join Kim Weller, Director of Analytical Services in ESPN’s Research & Analytics, Digital Media group and explore digital convergence in the context of the recent World Cup matches and more.

The Shift from "Reactive" to "Proactive": Predictive Analytics

There is a desire in digital organizations to get more from their vast stores of online interactions.  The focus is turning from using digital data to tell us what has happen to what will happen next and developing "proactive" capabilities for decision making and optimization. Unfortunately being proactive and predictive often requires different people, process, and technology than most web analytics organizations have deployed today. Join Kim Weller, Director of Analytical Services at ESPN’s Research & Analytics, Digital Media group and former web analytics product manager at SAS to discuss examples of proactive and predictive uses of digital data and the technology required to make the shift.

Connecting Analytics to Action

This is the real challenge for today’s enterprise measurement teams. Is action a function of good KPIs? Is it a function of good analysis? Whose responsibility is it to make analytics actionable – the analyst, the manager, the executive or the whole team? What does it take to go from measurement to insight and insight to action? Are there some types of analysis that just lend themselves better to action – and if so what are they and why? Are the opportunities for action usually predictable or do they more often come in unexpected places? James Robinson of the New York Times will lead this Huddle exploring the tricky dynamic of connecting analytics to action. As Director of Web analytics for the NY Times, he’s been a leader in exactly this domain – and had some notable successes. This is a chance to share your own experiences about what makes "action" happen and help work out with James what we can all do to make lightning strike more often!

Balancing Multiple Business Models with Web Analytics

For years, Branding, Corporate, Lead-Gen and Ad-Based sites have wished they had life as easy as traditional ecommerce sites when it comes to having clear and unambiguous success events. But it’s something of a case of "be careful what you wish for" as more and more sites add new business models and ecommerce to their already existing functions. Whether you add new business models or just support multiple models, how do you balance multiple goals by visitor to judge opportunity and success? How do you make site real-estate decisions that reflect the broader business imperatives? How do use metrics to ensure that visitors are getting what they want, finding what they need, and hearing what they should? James Robinson, Director of Web analytics at the New York Times, has faced exactly this dilemma. Between supporting ad-based revenue, selling subscriptions, and now driving to an online paywall, James has been faced with supporting and shaping critical business model decisions using measurement. In this Huddle, you’ll get a chance to discuss your own multi-model dilemmas and help figure out which approaches to measurement and multi-model success really work.

Web Analytics Teams

Effective site optimization is about more than technology.  Executing web analytics and interactive marketing processes and strategies is a resource intensive exercise.  Today teams are running very lean, all while being asked to accomplish more with less.  Web analytics teams experience a variety of staffing challenges, from gaining commitment to scale teams up to match their remit, and when they do get approval to hire it is difficult to locate qualified candidates.  This huddle will discuss the following topic and more:

• Is it possible to define a standard set of benchmarks to guide staffing requirements?
• What skillsets will web analytics teams need to cultivate or acquire in the future to stay competitive?
• How can web analytics teams establish internal credibility and make the case for ongoing investment?
• What can we do to extend career mobility for site optimization staff, and what measures can we take to alleviate the overall shortage of qualified candidates for site optimization roles?

Hybrid Analytics Solutions

Thanks to increasing levels of sophistication in the web analytics space, many practitioners are considering novel, cost-saving alternatives to the standard single-vendor model. In this session, we will focus on the various flavors of "hybrid" solutions, including combing free solutions for entry-level analysis and paid or custom solutions for deep-dive analysis. We will also address concerns many large enterprises face when considering the standard Terms of Service proffered by "free" solutions providers and suggest approaches to dealing with these standard terms. David McBride, head of Business Intelligence at Comcast Interacive Media (CIM) will discuss strategies for introducing this concept to organizations, both the initial "selling" of the concept and the transition process. Even if you have no plans to deploy a hybrid or home-grown system in the near-term, you will benefit from attending this huddle as it will provide you with strategic, long-term options.

Do's and Don'ts when Working with Developers

Often when implementing or troubleshooting an analytic solution it is necessary to interface with developers, both internal and external, to accomplish the task.  This need not be a painful experience.  Discuss how to define requirements and goals, communicate them to the developers, and turn your developers into an invaluable resource for your analytics projects. Join Rudi Shumpert, Manager of Marketing Web Development for Ariba, and discuss your own situation and gather ideas for improving your own developer-analyst relationships.

Integrating Web Analytics and CRM

Web Analytics is great at helping companies see what happens before a prospect becomes a customer. CRM systems are great at knowing what happens to the prospect after they complete a form or purchase from you. Integrating these two systems has traditionally been the an elusive "holy grail" of Marketing. In this huddle we will discuss some best practices for combining Website and CRM data and discover what your peers are doing to drive ROI. Does 1+1 = 3 here? Join Adam Greco, Senior Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com and world-renowned "Omni-Man" and discuss the integration of web analyics and CRM systems.

Turning Around Troubled Web Analytics Deployments

Do your executives actively use your Web Analytics deployment to make key business decisions? Are you associated with a web analytics deployment that isn’t cutting it for either technical or political reasons? Maybe you have recently joined a new company or new role and found that your web analytics deployment is like an "emperor with no clothes!" You are not alone! Join Adam Greco, Senior Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com in this session to share what issues you have faced and hear some ideas on how to bring your web analytics deployment "back from the dead…"

Developing Web Analytics Talent

Are you facing a long list of analytics requests but are short on talent to get them done? Are your job posts for a Web Analytics "Ninjas" going unanswered for months at a time? Are you're "best and brightest" quickly moving on to "bigger and better"? During this Huddle we will discuss how you can organically grow the Web Analytics talent that you need. We'll also explore the merits of using offshore analytical resources, supplementing your team with third party consulting resources, and using newly minted interns to help expand your analytics bandwidth. Finally, we'll also approach the issue from a different perspective and investigate growing the Web Analytics skills of your user base so that they can "fish" for insights on their own and relieve pressure being placed on your team.

How to "Close the Gap" to "Best in Class"

You've just taken over Analytics responsibilities for a strategic new website that's growing gangbusters but the instrumentation hasn't been touched in years. Pagenames are inconsistent (or better yet missing), Products aren't organized, and you have to be a CIA agent to figure out what the cryptic Campaign codes mean. The only consistency is that "None" appears as one of the top five values in all of your reports! Senior management now wants you to go in, clean house, and deliver earth shattering insights ... and of course they want this all done yesterday. Where do you start? More importantly, how do you prioritize your work so that you actually close the gap to best-in-class competitors rather than fall further and further behind? In this huddle we'll discuss which items to focus on first to get the "biggest bang for the buck", how to juggle traditional web analytics with the demands from emerging social and mobile analytics, and most importantly how to set expectations and deliver the "quick wins" that you need to build momentum.

Using Analytics to Support Multi-Channel Business Decisions

In a multi-channel business, it is important to understand how to use web analytics in a broader client experience landscape since the online channel is just one of many client touchpoints and focus areas. In this discussion, we will share our personal experiences on a wide range of topics around the use of web analytics in this environment and talk about using web analytics alongside metrics generated from ‘backend’ data to generate analysis and insights that may help the business make well-informed, client-focused decisions. Possible topics to cover include:

• How web analytics can inform sales/business development
• Web analytics and direct marketing synergies
• Importance of client segmentation
• Tools, techniques, and challenges to analyzing client behavior across channels
• The importance of explaining how to use web metrics with respect to 'bottom line metrics
• Leveraging web analytics to analyze online client feedback

Pushing Media Site Analytics Forward

What do we want to ask collectively for the web analytics industry to do to improve our ability to make insightful decisions based on web data? Last year, we did the first vertical-specific X Change Huddle – just for media. This is a great opportunity to sit down and talk about how we can push the state-of-the-art in our industry. Media sites face unique challenges around volume, success measurement, and integration – and this Huddle will give all of us in the industry and opportunity to compare notes, talk about what’s worked in the past year, and, most importantly, focus on what we need from web analytics to be better. We’ll devote a significant part of this Huddle to talking about what we need from tools and vendors to solve our unique problems.

Mobile Analytics for Web and Applications

No area of the online channel is more turbulent, more demanding, and more interesting than mobile. Turner has been at the forefront of mobile applications and measurement and has experimented with a variety of mobile measurement solutions and techniques. In this Huddle, we’ll discuss the state of Mobile Analytics for web and mobile applications -- the challenges, needs, and successes of various companies and the ability to tie this data to other data sources. We’ll tackle the differences between app and fixed web measurement and dive down into the emerging problems in the industry. We’ll also focus on how to think about and work around Apple’s recent announcement disallowing third parties to track mobile application consumption. This Huddle is designed to be a deep discussion into the hot-button issues around mobile measurement.

From a "Page Centric" to a "Component Centric" World

The web analytics industry has always had to chase internet technology and come up with new and more creative ways to "tag" and measure site activity. Until now, however, most of this was still limited to something like a flash component for the hero spot on the home page or perhaps a rotating image gallery on a category list page. While requiring specialized and overt tracking, until now these have largely been presented to customers in the context of a "Page" with interactions ultimately similar to standard links rendering a "new" or "next" page on click. The world is changing – Components are becoming much more interactive. User experience design is becoming much more efficient, far less linear, and much more personalized. All of this points to a brave new world where the internet experience is no longer governed by a web of interlinking pages but a montage of highly interactive rich media components dynamically interacting with each other creating a truly unique experience that is not bound by pages or linear steps to a desired outcome. John John Howard, Director of Business Intelligence for Lowes.com and discuss how our measurement world is changing around us.

Strategic Measurement Design – Balance and Trade-offs

All my pages are tagged but now the business wants to know how my non-product content is doing broken out by product category. Our pages aren’t tagged that way! Are the brand pages working? What does "working" mean? How did the Mother’s day marketing work in total? Why does it take so long to answer such simple questions? Setting up your site’s measurement plan is really much more involved than simply tagging each page. Beyond agreeing on a page naming convention there are numerous site, behavior, commerce, and customer elements than need to be overtly measured. To do this right and make it manageable on the reporting end a lot of set up work is required to properly identify the ways that are imperative to the site/business to group and measure content and customer interaction. Then coding or attribution schemes need to be developed to support these measurement imperatives or else everything becomes a deep dive analysis. John John Howard, Director of Business Intelligence for Lowes.com and discuss the balances and trade-offs in strategic measurement design.

Connecting Analytics to Action

This is the real challenge for today’s enterprise measurement teams. Is action a function of good KPIs? Is it a function of good analysis? Whose responsibility is it to make analytics actionable – the analyst, the manager, the executive or the whole team? What does it take to go from measurement to insight and insight to action? Are there some types of analysis that just lend themselves better to action – and if so what are they and why? Are the opportunities for action usually predictable or do they more often come in unexpected places? James Robinson of the NY Times will lead this Huddle exploring the tricky dynamic of connecting analytics to action. As Director of Web analytics for the NY Times, he’s been a leader in exactly this domain – and had some notable successes. This is a chance to share your own experiences about what makes "action" happen and help work out with James what we can all do to make lightning strike more often!

Balancing Multiple Business Models with Web Analytics

For years, Branding, Corporate, Lead-Gen and Ad-Based sites have wished they had life as easy as traditional ecommerce sites when it comes to having clear and unambiguous success events. But it’s something of a case of "be careful what you wish for" as more and more sites add new business models and ecommerce to their already existing functions. Whether you add new business models or just support multiple models, how do you balance multiple goals by visitor to judge opportunity and success? How do you make site real-estate decisions that reflect the broader business imperatives? How do use metrics to ensure that visitors are getting what they want, finding what they need, and hearing what they should? James Robinson, Director of Web analytics at the New York Times, has faced exactly this dilemma. Between supporting ad-based revenue, selling subscriptions, and now driving to an online paywall, James has been faced with supporting and shaping critical business model decisions using measurement. In this Huddle, you’ll get a chance to discuss your own multi-model dilemmas and help figure out which approaches to measurement and multi-model success really work.

Cutting Edge Analytics Warehousing

This Huddle will explore advanced technologies for storing and analyzing the massive amounts of web behavioral data that social and media sites routinely generate. Alex Schultz manages internet marketing at Facebook – and their data-driven decision-making has been spectacularly successful. Alex uses Hadoop and MapReduce to mine Facebook’s incredible data store to drive both acquisition and retention initiatives. If you’re warehousing analytics data, thinking about highly scalable processing systems like Hadoop, or trying to decide on an analytics architecture, this conversation is for you…

Data Fishing Exercises

What’s the most challenging task in web analytics? For most people, it’s doing real deep-dives into the data. When key metrics trends down inexplicably, you usually have to explore the data to figure out what’s happening. Finding correlations and testing for causality around key metric shifts is a critical and highly-demanding skill for individuals and for companies. Because when these questions come up – the whole organization wants answers. Alex Schultz manages internet marketing at Facebook (and eBay) and he’s faced exactly these sorts of situations. This huddle will explore how organizations try to answer deep-dive questions, fish for answers in the data, and what makes success at least a little more likely.

If you're ready to sign up for X Change 2010 you can register online and reserve your spot!