WAW - March

This is not really a review of Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) that was held in London on Monday 31st March 2008. The revised date was to allow our special guest speaker, Mr Eric T. Peterson.

Yes, this is stupidly late, but out of completeness I still feel compelled to post. Besides, these images have been sitting on my desktop for the past weeks and I need to do something with them

Mr Peterson spoke on the subject of the 'Future of Web Analytics'. His presentation was both entertaining and insightful.

Here is the 'official' March WAW round-up post. Unfortunately there was one picture missing:

Here is Mr Wayne Byrne on the left with his eyes almost shut. Dr Alan Hall (with his eyes shut) in the middle and myself, sporting open eyes and my stupid attempt at a beard.

The beard competition that I was sort-of competing in was started by the web team of a customer of ours - they will be playing this until the end of May, but I had to quit early.

The next London WAW will be on the 20th of May (a Tuesday - designed to interact with e-metrics).

August WAW Review

The August Web Analytics Wednesday in London seemed to be a success - although we don't have all the feedback yet to make objective measurements.

I had missed the July session, having been in Iceland /travel/reykjavik - so this was my first time at the venue (A big thank you to the Crown and Anchor - who provided us with our own bar. Fools!)

I have been asked to publish the presentation that I used for the pre-networking session, while there isn't a lot of context on the slides, it may give you a little flavour of what happened.

You should be able to click through the slides below :

Use here or open.

We didn't manage to cover all of the points, but here was the gist of the discussion :

• Not everyone agreed that 'mobile content' / 'mobile sites' were worth doing at all.
• Effectively measuring mobile sites is non-trivial, although it should be possible to get something of use (even if it's not 100 percent good (not that anything is)
• Some people are waiting on standards support from operators and manufacturers before attempting anything.
• I figure (maybe someone agrees) that we may need to remember what the web was like 10 - 15 years ago and just get on with it and code defensively around lack of standards / support.
• There is a greater requirment to support the mobile multi-channel mix, but having %somewhere% for an online 'campaign'/message to go back to would be a good idea.

Also - BlackBerry quirk

I have an interesting trick (noooo, not %that% one, the other one!) If you want to track the network that a mobile device belongs to then you can simply use the IP information and look it up in a sensible GeoIP database... BUT if you try to do this with enterprise BlackBerrys then it will tell you the organisation that they are attached to (useful in it's own right, but still doesn't tell you the network). So, IF you get in touch with me (email address on /bob ) then maybe I'll tell how you can add the network operator for the BlackBerry into the mix.

References :

November WAW : http://www.sclanalytics.com/resources/events/waw_november2007

The WAA : http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/

May WAW Review

And so another Web Analytics Wednesday passes. This is the second such even that I have assisted with and I think that it was even more successful than the first.

The most obvious change was the new venue - from some deep-underground basement bar, that anybody could wander through we have moved to the rather more up-market Royale room in the RubyBlue bar located off Leicester Square. Plenty of light and even some fresh air from the balcony overlooking the square itself.

The dedicated room made it much easier to mingle, as there was much less of a chance of wandering up to somebody at random and launch into some conversation about long tails before realising that they'd just come in for a drink.

The 'Networking' aspect was also helped by the lovely name badges that we managed to hand-out to just about everyone ... no more guessing that you already know someone and really ought to recognise them by now.

The main session (1800h onwards) was prefaced by an open discussion about the use of Web Analytics tools for SEO tasks (part led by myself and part by m'colleague Matt). This was the first time that either of us had done anything like this and I think we have learned the following lessons :

• Make sure that people are expecting to contribute with an opinion or questions.
• With the above point in mind, pre-announce the full agenda.
• Less, but better (perhaps more inflammatory) points. :-)
• Make sure that everyone can hear (duh!) and that there is a real 'circle' effect in the seating.
• Try and avoid a focus in the circle (although with a projector this can be difficult)
• ... any other ideas?

This time we (the remaining SCL mob decanted ourselves into a nearby restaurant where we mostly had really manky salmon fishcakes. I wish I knew the name of the place so I could suggest that you avoid it.

This time we all made it home without drunkenly disgracing ourselves.

Next event : http://www.sclanalytics.com/resources/events/waw_july2007