X Change Think Tank

The X Change "Think Tank" is a single day of hands-on sessions designed to provide far more tactical guidance than you can get nearly anywhere else. Many of the sessions are led by Semphonic's consultants, focusing on the nuances of web analytics tagging, report generation, report delivery, and other critical aspects of the practice.

Web Analytics Demystified's participation is slightly different. Because our consulting business focuses primarily on web analytics strategy, our Think Tank sessions reflect our focus. This year we will be offering two different sessions:

Web Analytics: People, Process, and Technology

During our "people, process, and technology" session (offered twice during Think Tank), Eric T. Peterson and John Lovett will discuss what is required to be truly successful in digital measurement. Our presentation is derived from a combined 30 years in the field and our work with some of the best known, best respected brands worldwide.

Join us during this session if:

You've every struggled to explain web analytics within your organization
You spend too much time generating reports and not enough time producing analysis
You're constantly being challenged to "get new tools" rather than use the ones you have
You're understaffed, overworked, and approaching the end of your rope
You want your boss to have a better appreciation for what web analytics can provide
You're the boss, and you want to learn how web analytics can change your business

We are more than happy to discuss our session if you're interested, just email us to set up a time to talk.

Ask the Experts: Web Analytics Demystified Partners

In our experience some questions cannot be answered in a book, a blog, on email, or in 140 characters. Some questions need to be asked in a public forum where real experts can do their best to answer based on their work or their own experiences. That's what this session is for.

Join us in this rare panel discussion featuring Eric T. Peterson and John Lovett and have us answer your questions live and in person. Over the 90 minute session we will answer as many questions as we possibly can, in as much detail as you'd like, and provide what is otherwise thousands of dollars worth of consulting for a fraction of the price.

Semphonic Think Tank Sessions

Testing & Auditing (Jon Entwistle & Breen Baker)
One of the most ignored and poorly performed tasks in web analytics is making sure that your implementation is right. Whether you’re testing a new implementation or auditing an existing one, it’s essential to understand what to look for and how to make sure what’s there is right. This class will cover the use of HTTP Debuggers including Firebug and Charles to test individual pages and functions, tools like WASP & ObservePoint to scan sites, templates for building testing checklists, scanning sites for likely measurement trouble spots, and the many joys of web analytics administrative configuration. A must for anyone doing or faced with serious implementation or auditing work.

Warehousing & Web Analytics – Steering in the Right Direction (Gary Angel)
The use of online data via web analytics has focused on reporting basic facts about aggregated site usage. But integrating site behaviors with additional customer information, understanding visitor mindset via current behavior, and driving customer contact via intelligent analysis of that behavior are the applications that drive the most value to the organization. Traditional web analytic solutions do not provide the tools or level of access to support these applications – leading organizations to reconsider exclusive use of the SaaS model. Bringing online behavioral data in-house has its own set of challenges. The amount of data generated by high-volume web sites is enormous. This vast amount of information is not easy to aggregate in a meaningful fashion and often lacks sufficient metadata to be handled intelligently. This class will help you understand the need for creating a more robust storage and analytics platform for online behavioral data, cover handling the infrastructure requirements of warehousing, and enumerate the key analytic benefits that are enabled from this effort.

Flexible User-Driven Excel Reporting (Jesse Gross)
Excel is the single most important business intelligence and reporting tool. It is by far the most common source of web analytics data in most organizations. But building and distributing Excel reports can be a nightmare for a central organization. In this class, we’ll cover how to build user-driven and analytic capabilities into your Excel templates so that far fewer reports can deliver more flexibility and more information to users. A focus will be placed on features that keep automated reports fresh, relevant and actionable months after they are rolled out. Techniques covered will include many advanced Excel techniques for optimizing user selection, laying out analytics data, creating robust navigation, building automated annotation, and doing all this while keeping the size of your Excel reports manageable.

Using Discover for Analysis (Paul Legutko)
Discover is Omniture’s workbench for analysts. It’s a powerful tool for both reporting and true analysis featuring excellent real-time segmentation, n-dimensional reporting, and some interesting visualization capabilities. However, Discover is a big step up from SiteCatalyst both in cost and complexity. If you are considering upgrading to Discover and want a real sense of what it can do – or you’ve taken the Discover plunge but don’t know how best to really use it, this class if for you. The class will cover Discover from a business perspective – not a point and click demo but a real working session on how to use and what it can accomplish in the real-world.

Mobile Measurement (Greg Dowling)
With new technologies putting the Internet in everyone’s pocket and an exploding apps market taking the possibilities to dizzying new heights, mobile devices have assumed a central role in the Internet equation. But going mobile is the easy part. The trick is to make sure your investment pays off, and for that, new metrics strategies are needed. This class will offer an in depth review of the mobile measurement landscape from a SMART perspective focusing on the Strategy, Measurement, Analysis, Reporting, and Tactics you need to ensure mobile success. We will cover mobile metrics and tactics for measurement enablement across mobile web sites and mobile applications. This class will help you answer questions such as "Why does mobile matter and where does it fit within my organization?", "What mobile metrics can I collect and how do I capture them?", and "What are the current capabilities and limitations of mobile measurement tools?"

From Business Requirements to Tag Design to Tag (Jon Entwistle)
If you’ve ever wondered about the relationship between what you want to measure and what goes into a tag, this is the class for you. A class for implementers AND managers, the goal of this class is to show how specific business requirements drive down to a tagging specification and then an implementation. Along the way, you’ll see some different approaches for mapping requirements that we’ve used and find out what worked (and didn’t work!) with each. If you’re a developer, this class will help you really understand why a tag is or should be the way it is. If you’re a manager, this class will help you understand how what you want has to get embedded in the tag and what’s involved in getting it there.

Survey Analytics: Using VOC Data Integrated with Web Analytics (Gary Angel)
Most organizations have deployed both web analytics and online survey or customer feedback technology. But integrating these data streams has been slower in coming. This class will cover the basics of an integration strategy (where to put the data, how to make the connection, where to do the analysis) and then describe various analytic projects and reports that take advantage of each level of integration. Along the way, we’ll cover the proper roles for online survey vs. feedback mechanisms vs. web analytics and where the sweet spots are for each.

When and How to Use Omniture Tools (Jesse Gross)
Omniture provides a wide range of user tools for accessing data and reports – so many that sometimes it’s hard to decide which to use and who should have access to what. In this class, we’ll cover many of the most important reporting and analysis tools including SiteCatalyst, Excel Integration, Discover, DataWarehouse, SAINT, and Data Sources. For each, we’ll describe how it works, when it should be used, where it really shines, and what it can’t do. The class will also cover the most appropriate audience for each type of tool. Finally, we’ll cross-reference a number of common real-world tasks with the tool set to show how this basic knowledge translates into a real-world plan for who should use each tool and when they should use it!

PPC & SEM Measurement/Marketing Attribution (Paul Legutko)
In this class we’ll deep-dive into one of the most important tasks in web analytics – measuring and evaluating the success of your marketing efforts. With Search Engine Marketing a huge part of many sites success, it simply doesn’t make sense to silo and entrust your measurement to vendors in charge of Pay-Per-Click or Search-Engine-Optimization programs. In this class, we’ll consider the basic infrastructure for measuring campaigns, some unique analytic methods appropriate to Search Engine Marketing, take a broader look at campaign reporting and analysis and drill-down into the infrastructure and techniques necessary for doing the most fundamental and important campaign management task of all – attribution.

Web Analytics Communication…It’s Not Just Presentations (Phil Kemelor)
Failure in communications is probably the biggest single reason for failure of Web analytics initiatives. You can always trace a poor decision or missed expectations to a lack of clarity, lack of listening, lack of questions and lack of clear documentation. In this session, we’ll dissect common web analytics program scenarios to understand where breakdowns of communication occur and how to remedy them through proven communication strategies and tactics. You’ll come away from this session with ideas and inspiration on how to improve your web analytics initiatives through better communication with your team, your management, your stakeholders and others within your organization whom you rely on to build a successful program.

Tagging a Web 2.0 Site (Breen Baker)
Lots of organizations are fine with basic HTML tagging but struggle when it comes to Ajax, DHTML, Flash, Video and Mobile. This class will get down and dirty with basic principles for tagging all types of non-HTML content. We’ll cover how to think about rich experiences from the web analytics perspective of page views, links and events. We’ll talk about capturing time, pathing, and additional information about key events. We’ll consider how to minimize costs and maximize measurement. And we’ll work through who needs to do what and when – key issues when figuring out how to integrate measurement into a rich media project plan.

Use-Case Analysis (Gary Angel)
Everything old is new again! In this class, we’ll drill-down into behavioral use-case analysis and examine a set of techniques and methods that we’ve been having great success with at Semphonic. Use-Cases have always been a fundamental design technique in the online world and they’ve been studied before. But we’ve found that by taking a systematic approach to use-case identification and study we can often find the unexpected use-cases that capture new and important site behaviors. In this class, we’ll look at some actual examples of use-case analysis, explain some of the techniques for measuring use-case efficiency and identifying new use-cases, and consider how best to present a use-case analysis. We believe that along with Functionalism, Use-Case Analysis is one of the most powerful and generalizable methods of real-world analysis. If you’re interested in techniques for "breaking the analysis barrier," this class is a perfect fit.

Functional Analysis (June Dershewitz)
Semphonic has poured ten plus years of real-world intensive web analytics practice into the concepts behind Functionalism – a powerful methodology for actually doing web analytics. Whether you are an implementer who needs to understand how web analytics works, a manager who wants to get best-practices and approaches for an analytics team, or an analyst who wants to step up your ability to do real-world analysis not just reporting, then this class is for you. We’ll cover the basic ideas behind Functionalism and then show how these translate into real-world functional analysis. You’ll learn to understand and identify the key page types, the types of metrics appropriate to each, and the techniques for getting those metrics from common web analytic tools.

Google Analytics as the 2nd Tool (Allison Hartsoe and Ryan Praskievicz)
Enterprise deployments of Google Analytics are now estimated to be 60% according to Forrester. Often this starts as a simple need for campaign tracking and expands to something more. This raises the question of how should you be using Google Analytics in conjunction with your existing analytics platform? In this class we will cover common deployment gotchas, data reconciliation issues, what Google Analytics is and is not good for and how to put it all together.

You can sign up to attend the Think Tank when you register for X Change 2010.