EMetrics started by Jim Sterne a self confessed Virgo started the conference series in his home town of Santa Barbra. It is a feature event of web analytic professionals in a number of cities around the world. This year is its first year in Sydney, and is being run concurrently alongside SMX Sydney.

SMXSydney has had a huge success in growth over the last year jumping from 475 participants in 2009 to around a 1000 in 2010. It is Barry and Jim’s goal to grow Emetrics in 2011 by the same growth percentage for 2011. What follows is my takeouts and impressions of some of the speakers presentations.

Time to rethink your marketing metrics

Jim Sterne is a master speaker opening his address ‘Time to rethink your marketing metrics’ with great audience participation.

State of play in Australia

Hurol  Inan from Bienalto talked about the recent research paper that his company has just completed and launched at the start of the conference. It is an annual paper which can be downloaded from www.beinalto.com/research. The survey conducted over 100 plus participants and two case studies answered questions about the use and direction of web analytics as used by various industries.

Some quoted facts were

• 76% of Australian analytics is done using Google analytics.
• A  drop in Webtrends from 24% to 15% as a used analytic tools.
• The number one struggle for industry at the moment is the acquisition of staff with the right amount of experience.
• A lot of companies have spread the work of analytics across a number of employees.
• Analytics as a discipline at the moment is sitting with in the digital marketing departments
• Web analytics has not yet been integrated fully with the traditionally research teams sitting with in company’s structure.
• A number of questions related around accreditation and where to source people.

How to make Conversion Optimization work for your business

Stuart McKeown from Hitwise was the next speaker. His opening remark was that everyone is a conversion specialist. Each of us knows what we like and do things to make sure our lives run according to our preference for example we know how to set the toaster so that our toast is done correctly for us. But finding out and raising conversion from 2% (average) is a job for getting into the shoes of the visitor and not placing our own opinion in the way.

• Track your online efforts setting up goals and funnels
• Segment the data that you have coming in, break the information up into Organic/Paid/Email etc and compare the data sets and take learning’s from one segment source to improve another segments reach and conversion return
• Make small changes using A/B testing. A number of examples given of how much of an impact this can be. A particular blogger was quoted as raising his twitter follow conversion through the link on his site from 4% to 12% by changing the wording. The paraphrased  initial wording being “Here is my twitter account” to “A definite call to action of “Here it is and follow me on twitter by clicking here”
• Emotions play a role in conversion with Frustration, Confidence, Impulsivity and Clarity being talked about. Frustration with speed of page download is a huge factor in conversion with Firefox given as an example of getting eight record download days of its browser achieving 60 million downloads in a specified period by reducing the time that it took to download from 7 sec to 2 sec.
• Some tools he recommended researching for use were Madlib and Kampyle

Beyond the bounce, modeling and measuring qualified visitors

As always Rod Jacka’s presentation showcased a wonderfully analytically intelligent mind. He challenged right up front Avanish’s take on bounce rate and set out to help us understand that bounce rate really has value. That value however is subject to circumstance surrounding its usage. Used incorrectly it is bad, used correctly it is insightful. It is a lot like trying to use Australian dollars while on holiday in Turkey, but when in Australia it really is worth every cent.

A big piece of the puzzle for me came from his insightful thoughts about segmenting visitors and qualifying audiences and then using bounce rate when looking at a particular segmentation group.

Creating a structured digital marketing, reporting, optimization & testing framework

By far the fastest and most compact presentation delivered by anyone at emetrics, and probably at SMX Sydney. The wealth of knowledge and experience was apparent as Martin referred to pieces of information which would have taken years to learn in the school of hard knocks.

I found his information on organizational frameworks really helpful. His framework touched on the procedure that an organization needs to follow in becoming data driven. Implementing this procedure with an organizational team which has been well thought through is the key to getting it right. Identify actual tasks that need to be done, think about the technology available then follow up with robust procedures to achieve the tasks.

His other take away point for me was ‘all work must lead to Customer satisfaction’. Using the formula NSAT=VSAT-DSAT+100 a satisfaction metric used by comscore (I believe) he stressed that it was vital to know how satisfied web visitors were and how satisfied those visitors are of competition websites.

New search results require new metrics

Andrew gave a really good analytic SEO presentation, packed full of insightful tips around link building metrics and keyword analytics that Hotelclub use for their SEO activities. He stressed that SEO has changed enormously with personalization, localization and socialization.

He finished his presentation highlighting the new feature in Google webmaster tools where they are providing impressions for organic results. This feature launched recently helps SEO’s understand where they are ranking in the new world of personalization.

Integrating social media performance metrics into overall search analytics

Dennis Yu CEO of  Blitzlocal and Gillian Muessing SEOmoz’s mom and co-founder presented after lunch and from all those in the emetics room we apologies for not being more lively. They did however run out of time because of questions and where late for their next SMX presentation. Dennis and Gillian co presented which was great to see.

The presentation was brilliant yet simple. An exercise of analytical work in showing us how easy it is to swap current knowledge of measuring PPC into measuring social media. Although the models are very different the underlying principal and actions are the same. Just change the metrics and the mindset.

Dennis was really energetic as he was asked how the ATO(Australian tax office) could use facbook. He emphatically grinned as he said ‘YES’ the ATO can get socially connected. Gillian told us of her experience in America of the state where she has to submit her tax return and how they used electronic personalization to deliver her better service.

Another comment by Gillian received a few twitter and retweets which was that ‘as a marketer it was essential to do what users do’. If they play facebook- Farmville then internet marketers need to play it as well. No matter how boring it may seem or how inane it is if web users are doing it then marketers need to do it.

Dennis gave a last facebook usage tip as he wrapped up. When implementing facebook don’t send visitors to the wall. Integrate functionality that normally lives in the website back into facebook. Then send visitors to the booking form or subscribe page, let visitors first view of a facebook fan site be a call to action.

Optimizing search advertising from ad to landing page

Fredrick a true Googalite talked about PPC and optimization. During the adwords segment some of the recent changes that google have introduced to help advertisers spend more wisly was talked about.

What really caught my attention was the section of his talk that focused on Google optimizer. Although I have used A/B testing it was great to be walked through the process and have explained the things to look for when setting up a test. He encouraged everyone to get testing giving examples of Googles own testing on Youtube where a test raised the youtube signups by 8%. Another test he talked about was the test Google did when thinking about moving the email field to the start of the signup process in the adwords singup form. After the test it was found that having the address at the end of the process was much better than having it up front although technically it gave Google the ability to offer people the ability to complete the signup process in chunks and return and continue later from where they left off.

Although I thought I got most of the presentation Rod Jacka’s question about fractionalization followed by Fredricks response reminded me of how  much there is to learn just on the one topic of A/ B testing.

In wrap up congratulations to Jim Sterne for a great conference. The knowledge gained  was definitly worth while the time and cost spent.