XChange, Web Analytics 3.0 and Behavioral Targeting

I am back from from XChange, a conference organized by Semphoic in Napa last Thursday and Friday. The Conference consisted of many small discussion groups ("Huddles") hosted by facilitator experts in specific topic areas. I felt that this was a great way to have all the attendees participate in the conversation. In most of the conferences it is usually one way communication (speaker to audience), even though there is an opportunity to ask questions still only few participants are involved, but these types of huddles provided a way for every participant to talk about their experiences and voice their opinions.

I lead the huddles on Behavioral Targeting and Practical Approach to Online Campaign Measurement.
Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified was the keynote speaker. As always Eric is fun and informative to listen to. In his keynote he talked about how we are fast moving (already are) in Web Analytics 2.0 era and introduced the concept of Web Analytics 3.0, mobile analytics (see side note). Attached is the pdf of his Keynote presentation.

It was a great event and I congratulate Gary, Grace and other members of Semphonic team for arranging such a great event. I look forward to the next year’s event.



Gary Angel and I at XChange


Picture courtesy Eric Peterson

In case you could not make it to XChange and missed my great huddle on “Behavioral Targeting”, you have another opportunity to listen my views on Behavioral Targeting at eMetrics in Washinton D.C. eMetrics is another great conference that brings the participants from all around the world. Last eMetrics in San Francisco was the largest to date, the one is D.C. is expected to bring even more attendees.

Side Note: Eric and I later discussed how I did some early mobile analytics work for one of my clients, a leading mobile services provider, while I was a digiMine (now Revenue Science). At that time we were still trying to figure out the whole mobile analysis. Our solution was a hack; we used wap gateway logs and converted them into web logs format. Phone number was used in place of a cookie. It was not the best solution but given what we had it was great and helped us analyze and meet our business goals. Now the technology is changing and I am sure web analytics tools will become sophisticated enough to cater to the measurement, analysis and optimization needs. I even put together a presentation on how Behavioral Targeting can be deployed combining the web and mobile data; however, this never reached anywhere (long story) but I know it was coming. Revenue Science just announced Mobile BT, more on this later (Disclaimer: The presentation I put together has nothing to do with Revenue Sciences new Mobile BT offering, like I said my presentation never reached anywhere except one person).