11 Reasons You Should Go To The Emetrics Summit

February 17, 2007

I could have spent the whole day writing about why one should go to the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, May 7-10. But life calls, and so I have limited myself to the first eleven that came to mind.

1. Lifetime Supply of Altoids. I was never an Altoids fan before I started to go to the Summit, but they give them out at least twice, and now I have them on all my desks and in my car.

2.To quote Eric Peterson, “I think the most important thing [for a new web analyst to do] is to go to the Emetrics Summit. Anywhere in N. America or Europe, you have a great conference where you can go and learn. Book learning is good, really talking to people about the challenges you face is better. It’s the hallway conversations, the dinner parties that specifically helps people who are new to this — as long as they are willing to put themselves out there and say, ‘Hi, I’m [name] and am new to web analytics.'” Most people actually think the Summit is for advanced analysts, which is a sure sign that it is for all analysts…

3) Those free Omniture flashlights. They cast a curiously strong beam.

4) You get to meet Chris Gemignani from Juice Analytics. (If you aren’t reading Juice’s blog, you should be.) I personally plan on cornering Chris at lunch
one day, where I will force him to give me advice on the visualization of free body diagrams for the mechanical engineering textbook that my spouse is writing. (How was that for one long run-on sentence?) And for those of you who don’t live with a professor, go hear Chris speak so that you can present the data to your boss in a boss-friendly way.

5) You might get a free Visual Sciences thumb drive. I used to have two, one from each Summit, but my daughter (she of the Smashing Pumpkins poster) stole one.

6) To quote Dave Rhee off the Web Analytics Forum, “I tell others that eMetrics is the one conference they *must* attend, even if they have to take vacation days and pay for the travel and conference costs out of their own pockets.”

7) You’ll learn more about customer profiling from Microsoft. They are a great company to be doing this seminar, since they have created so many wonderful free profiling tools.

8) You get to hear both Ian Houston from Visioactive and Judah Phillips from Reed Business Interactive. In the same session. It will be like Web Analytics for geeks the most technical and sophisticated minds around. But don’t worry if you aren’t super advanced; during the same time slot, you can come hear yours truly talk about WA for beginners. (You know me, I hate using those polysyllabic words and the concepts that go with them.)

9)

Web analysts are friendlier than SEOs. I have been thinking about this line for a long time, ever since a friend came back from PubCon and told me that it was like high school. BTW, I don’t think this is true of all SEOs — when I was at SES Chicago, I sure did get some great help from them, especially Rand Fishkin. But web analysts don’t call themselves rock stars, and I think we work really hard to be inclusive. A couple of months ago, someone from the Emetrics summit called me to brainstorm about ways that new attendees can meet more established analysts. I don’t know what they decided on, but if you are new, please come up to me and introduce yourself. Here, I’ll include my picture. I love to connect people and will do my best to connect you, too.

10) You’ll learn how eBay optimized their customer acquisition strategy and if you are smart, put some of those ideas to work for yourself.

11) The food is awesome.

12) You sit and talk to web analysts all day long, and then you have a group of friends that you can write for help. (Trust me, I do it all the time.)

Bonus: You’ll come home with many more tools in your kit and the ability to do a better job of increasing your company’s sales and the effectiveness of your organization’s website.

But, don’t register here yet — first, go to the WAA membership page and become a WAA member. That way, you save 10% off the early bird price of $1990, and the $190 you save pays for the $129 in membership fees. Maybe your boss will let you pocket the extra $61 that your company saved altogether? Nah, didn’t think so.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics