Call for Papers

The Regence Customized Rewards Program: The Return on Investment from Fitness, Weight Loss and Media-based Programs

In 2004, Regence launched its Building a Healthy Future campaign to improve the health and wellbeing of its employee population: to “walk the talk” of wellness as part of its member-centered mission to help its employees and covered members achieve and maintain good health. In 2005 the Customized Rewards program was initiated and provided incentives to participate in educational programs and fitness campaigns. In 2007, management requested the assessment of the wellness program to describe participation from 2005-2008 (for program management reasons) and to learn which of the various aspects showed promise in reducing healthcare costs or improving productivity (i.e., determine if a return on investment existed).

This study evaluated savings achieved from the Customized Rewards employee wellness program. We compared the relative value of participation in physical fitness, Weight Watchers, media-based educational programs and health risk assessment groups to risk-matched nonparticipants. Savings estimates were derived from medical claims cost growth and the comparison of the likelihood and costs incurred from disability and unplanned absence. We then applied rigorous program and overhead costs to develop the return on investment estimate. Lastly, we analyzed the change in health risk over time to corroborate changes in claims costs and productivity improvements. To provide specific learning objectives for attendees, we will share our methodology for pulling data together from a comprehensive program set of activities into analyzable groupings, methods used in health risk assessment and modeling techniques which generated savings estimates.

User Experience Optimization Initiative: Automating Webtrends Integration in Websphere Portal

Today, IBM customers are demanding better integration between WebSphere Portal Server and Webtrends. They use site metrics to capture and measure user activity primarily to understand end user needs, behaviors and site usability so that portals can be better designed and targeted. In
response to our customers requests, IBM created the IBM User Experience Optimization Initiative that teams IBM with Webtrends to seamlessly integrate their products with the WebSphere Portal and IBM Software Group solutions, including IBM OmniFind, Lotus Quickr, and IBM Lotus Web Content Management.
Description

This session will discuss and demonstrate how integration is performed, and foundation enhancements underway for future versions of WebSphere Portal that will make analytics solution integration even simpler and more seamless.

One-to-One Email Merchandising with Webtrends and ExactTarget

With ExactTarget’s advanced email functionalities and Webtrends’ integrated analytics tools, we’ve tested and analyzed many aspects of our overall email strategy from send frequency, day-of-week and time-of-day optimization to subject lines, layouts and advanced segmentation techniques. Dynamic one-to-one merchandising has been the ultimate goal of our quest and we’re finally there. In our analysis, we made sure to exclude the default product referred orders so only the dynamically placed products were credited. As we had hoped, customers seem to react impulsively to these familiar products…this is really working.

Motorcycle Superstore successfully launches dynamic one-to-one email merchandising by leveraging Webtrends customer behavioral analytics with ExactTarget’s cutting-edge email marketing solution. The first live send went out on Monday, September 21st at 9:30 am PST, and initial reports indicate a total email revenue lift of over 24% with only 10% of the list receiving dynamic recommendations.

http://www.newsguide.us/automotive/motorcycle-bike/Motorcycle-Superstore-Launches-Dynamic-One-to-One-Email-Merchandising/

Web Analytics is dead?

stop looking over your shoulder!
Description

A visual journey which will attempt to move you way from basic reporting instead focusing on powering customers needs using data.

The Future is NOW!

Augmented reality? it will never catch on…

The way your customers interact with you as brands has changed and will continue to change, this session is a look at what the current generation of cyborgs will expect from you as organisations.

Using Text Analytics to Understand Your Twitter Followers

“Using Text Analytics to Understand Your Twitter Followers” describes work in progress towards follower characterization using natural language processing.

It’s been said, “You are what you tweet.” Using the Twitter API, it’s possible to automatically download the most recent tweets from all of your followers and apply natural language processing algorithms to those tweets. What can you learn from this?

1. What do your followers have in common with you and with each other?
2. Are there “logical groups” / “segments” of followers?
3. What are the “connection points” between you and any specific follower.

This presentation describes my research in this area using open source tools and publicly-available algorithms. Others working in this area are encouraged to contact me and share notes.

[...] be accepted. Session presenters chosen will be notified by November 30, 2009. The clock is ticking! Send us your presentation idea and type of format, and present at Engage 2010! Following the Engage 2010 conference are four [...]

Personalized Data-driven creative

Recent moves by Adobe signal a long overdue recognition that the future of creative will include a large dose of data-driven personalization. In this session we’ll explore the best practices already employed by webtrend customers and partners in the use of site based data to drive thousands of creative variations. The focus will not be on a particular vendor but on the framework of data driven creative, a large dose of examples, the success criteria and “watch-outs” along with the results that these types of campaigns have proven in the marketplace. The future of data-driven creative (rich media, multi-dimensional profiles, machine learning) will also be explored.

What to do about privacy?

The privacy landscape is rapidly evolving and can have a material impact on how sites are able to leverage the data they collect on their site visitors. This paper will explore “up to the moment” developments in privacy along with perspectives of privacy advocates, the industry, regulators, and vendors. It’s expected that new developments will emerge in the next three months preceeding this session and our Washington D.C. privacy representatives and our position in the industry will allows us to get the “news” to attendees along with a longer term perspective.

Hidden Gems in WebTrends Analytics

Sometimes-overlooked features and tricks in WebTrends Analytics that are useful to power users and newbies alike.

Dashboard Basics, Tricks, and Directions

WebTrends has done an outstanding job of making its data available to Excel. But what about the next step?

This workshop will present real examples and approaches to dashboards collected from WebTrends power users, with how-tos, whys, shortcuts, and a few anecdotes.

Social Media Metrics

Customers and prospective customers are talking about you and with you on blogs, in discussion groups, via Twitter, on YouTube, etc. Are you listening? Engaging? Is it worth it? After eight years of writing articles and producing the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit it was time to write another book. Not available until Spring of 2010, I am happy to present the practical side of measuring the business value of social media.

[...] We are also still accepting talks until Monday, November 16th. If you would like to submit a talk, either post your talk to our submission page. [...]

The Magic of Slice’n Dicing

Segmentation is at the heart of the true discovery process, but too often it is the road not taken. We will present the power of segmentation not only as a marketing tool, but as a powerful instrument in the exploration of data. We will learn not to be afraid of taking paths with no destination, of retreating from barren lands, and of taking essential risks. We will learn to pursue root causes while avoiding being blinded by correlation.

We propose a journey into methodology, and how solid knowledge can be called truth, until proven otherwise.

When it comes to understanding visitor behavior, i.e. “what” your visitors did, web analytics is your best friend, but it only tells 1/2 the story. The other 1/2 of understanding your visitors come from understanding their motivations, i.e. “why” they would do something.

This workshop will present real examples and approaches on how to combine quantitative & qualitative data to develop a Complete User Model that will allow you to understand your visitors in ways you’ve never believed.

Online Display Advertising: Evolve or Die

Synopsis: Online display advertising has largely remained the same over the year which is an analog to age old practices in traditional media from pricing models to measurement to ad creatives. Search engine marketing has changed the landscape. Search in essence targets user with specific knowledge whereas online display still guesses (since audience targeting, for the most part, is a guess/approximation of what users are up to).

There is a big opportunity to tap into online display advertising if we can unlock its value.

[...] We are also still accepting talks until Monday, November 16th. If you would like to submit a talk, either post your talk to our submission page. [...]

No matter the size of your company, campaign or budget, you should be engaging in analysis and analytics.

Webtrends might be the Cadillac of analytics and provide insight and advanced features not provided by most free tools, but not every agency or small business can afford it. So until you get there – there are free tools you can use to get the basics. Then with that data teach your clients to understand that analytics is THE most important aspect of their digital campaign in social media, paid search and website optimization. Because after all, it creates and justifies the budget for future use of the medium.

The basic human, business and cultural need for relevance is the greatest force driving innovation in web analytics today.

Talking is cheaper than listening; it’s easy to create data and information, but structuring the mess of the collective into knowledge and wisdom is difficult and expensive. Given the economics of broadcast, the compression of information cycles, the still-evolving thought around integrating “engagement marketing” with direct marketing channels and the inability to create a tight link between marketing investments and economic profit, is it any surprise that soundbites win over nuance, that we struggle in finding the balance between inefficiency and serendipity, that we continue to promote content instead of creating context?

What role will web analytics play in helping people solve these problems for personal and professional uses?

Breakout Session: Social Commerce

Everyone’s talking about it, but who’s doing it? Who’s doing it well? This session will examine the ways that companies are converting social interactions into dollars, the future opportunities for weaving social media and commerce, and the secret ingredient that makes it possible (i.e. analytics).

You’ve installed the tags, started analyzing reports, found optimizations, but there still seems to be a general lack of adoption and engagement across the entire organization. You’ve run into the problems created by a lack of web analytics governance. Web analytics is not an island, but must be integrated with the organization, its direction, management, cycles, and such.

Which governance model fits best? Decentralized? Federated? How does the executive sponsor fit into the model? What IS an executive sponsor and why are they so crucial? How will you close the loop with analytics and development? Ensure data is always available, improving, and consistently understood? Come to this session on governance and you’ll learn all of this and a lot more!

KPIs are meaningless when not correctly defined. And they rarely are.

If you start identifying KPIs from the technology side you’ll get hopelessly lost in analysis paralysis. Instead… start from the business side. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can zero in on those KPIs using logical processes.

KPIs are vital to make truly informed decisions but are often hidden by an array of reports and the complexity of their presentation. KPIs hold the promise of tracking a few select values which elucidate how your web site is performing and even how your overall marketing is faring. And KPIs are even more invaluable when measured against business goals and objectives.

But how do you figure out what the KPIs are for your business? And how do you make sure your KPIs aren’t FKPIs (Fake KPIs)?

The Intranet is the center of your organization. It defines the corporate culture, allows for collaborative learning and signifies workflow efficiencies.

While containing some of the same actions, events and process as your main site, the audience of your Intranet is obviously much different, however, more traceable. You sit on the segmented clickmap of your organizations workflow. Embrace it. Answer questions such as:
• Who is really engaging in that sales info.
• Is there a need to translate content.
• is the corporate balanced scorecard seen by all organizations?
• Is everyone pulling out of their 401K plan?
• Do you see excessive downloads coming from a “relocated” department?

Full PDF located at:
http://www.youranalyticssite.com/wp-intranet.php

Tracking Off-line Conversions

You have your on-site KPI, yet people who visit your web site may still pick-up the telephone and call you. The reason for their call may be to ask a question, to complete orders, or one of a thousand different reasons.

Over the years a variety of 3rd party tools has emerged to help provide analytics for these calls. This includes the ability to relate it back to a specific refers or campaigns. Yet, without integrating their data into your WebTrends data you don’t know what page the person was on when they call, what path they had taken before the call or what they did after the call.

By integrating your call tracking back into WebTrends, you can tag the call as a conversion including assigning a value to the call, see the path to and from the call and directly relate the call to a specific campaign, organic search term or paid search term. With this off-line conversion data in the same place as your on-line conversion data the job of evaluating and optimizing campaigns is made easier.

Twitter Analytics: Behind the Numbers

The real-time web is upon us, and many new systems and metrics for monitoring and analyzing conversations and interactions are appearing all over the place. How do we interpret this new data? How is it derived? More importantly, how do we communicate it in a way that is meaningful and valuable?

This session focuses on the technical methodology behind several emerging analysis metrics and applications. We’ll focus on topics like auto-sentiment, how it works and how to interpret it. Twitter influence for your Twitter account, and understanding how influence contributes holistically to your brand through reach, resonance and engagement.

We will also cover the current technical limitations of Twitter data mining, and how to measure conversations not just for an account, but mentions for a product or brand.

Riding the Mobile Augmented Reality Wave

Gartner has listed augmented reality as one of the top ten disruptive technologies through 2012, and this hot, emerging industry is already breaking into mainstream media by way of digital and magazine advertising, and more recently through mobile applications on the Android and iPhone platforms.

In this session, we’ll talk about one of the top-selling iPhone augmented reality applications Robotvision, and how I brought it to market in just 6 weeks. We will talk about how location-based mobile augmented reality apps like Layar and Wikitude work, and how you can begin using this technology with your own GeoLocation data for the iPhone development platform.

We will also cover the current limitations of mobile augmented reality, and where the industry is headed based on the vision of hardware manufacturers, futurists and the technology media.

Making room for the Titanic – how to efficiently and effectively take on the task of managing your data and analytics within your business.

You know that Data is king, and you’re collecting a lot of it, but it can be overwhelming to manage the resources and expectations to successfully impact your organization as you intended when you chose to invest in Web Analytics. Learn what to do with mountains of data, how to compartmentalize your analytics across company departments to share workload and drive business objectives, meet revenue goals and measure ROI. Plus, you’ll learn the value of custom reports for your business and how to get started.

Support Documentation: Case Study on Custom Report Design for the Hospitality industry introduces the application of custom report design and showcases how it stimulates customer comprehension, usability and perceived value while offering sophisticated tools across company department lines to aid in operational success and measurability.

Engaging and managing an analytic business culture – building the path over a mountain of data to successfully get to the sea of opportunity.

You are collecting mounds of data and what you seek is the successful transcendence into smart, valid decision making. You’ll learn to go beyond the mere tracking and reporting of web site activity, and step into both the art and the science of successfully using web analytics to impact the many departments within your organization. We’ll tap into how to get organizational buy-in for analytics usage and data-driven decision making, choosing and deploying the right reports and solutions to meet your business needs, and communicating information to many constituents within the organization.

We’ll cover web analytics management strategies providing both the knowledge and the practical skills to succeed as a web analytics manager. If you have all of a sudden found yourself “in charge of web analytics”, this course will help you succeed in your new role within the organization.

Support Documentation: Case Study on Custom Report Design for the Hospitality industry introduces the application of custom report design and showcases how it creates organizational involvement from multiple departments while enhancing customer comprehension, usability and perceived value.

Virtual Monetization: Hard Currency or Funny Money?

Without an ROI it is difficult to get the attention of your executives and win the budget you deserve. But, how do you calculate ROI on a non-ecommerce site? Peter Sanborn manages web analytics for the largest non-ecommerce, non-advertising site in the world, Microsoft.com. Learn how he has built a financial framework for measuring the ROI of customer engagement and using that to drive more investment in web analytics at Microsoft.com.

Garbage in, Garbage Out: The importance of correct implementation and how you can know you’re on the right track

In analytics, there’s nothing worse than basing business decisions on faulty data. This discussion will focus on some of the critical metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can increase the value of your Webtrends implementation. Many of these are freely available by default in Webtrends, but need to be turned on; some are additional metrics that we’ve found helpful over the years.

We’ll also talk about quality assurance procedures that can help you check your implementation to verify that your implementation is complete, as well as some ways to “gut check” your data to make sure it makes sense. In addition, we’ll look at best practices regarding profile and template creation that can help ensure that your analysts are looking at the right data and understand what they’re seeing.

Robust Segmentation: Setup, Analysis, and Application to real-life campaign and site optimization

The 80/20 rule shows up everywhere in analytics; for example, many site analysts discover that 80% of their revenue comes from only 20% of their customers. In this session, we’ll discuss methodologies for identifying those high-value segments and applying that information to improve your content delivery and marketing campaigns.

Your audience can be segmented in a number of ways—geographically, via site engagement, based on keywords used to find your site (and within your internal search)…the list goes on. We’ll look at how to find the most meaningful audience segments for your site, and how to configure Webtrends to keep track of these segments and how to measure how well you’re responding to their needs.

We will also talk about a number of ways to use this data through your marketing campaigns, site content strategies, and targeting technologies to improve usability, reduce wasteful spending, and increase revenue per visitor.

Value based optimization for Ad Director

If your website doesn’t provide clear-cut, high-volume conversion points, using automated bid management tools like Ad Director can present a challenge. To make intelligent bid changes, Ad Director needs statistically significant sample sizes; however, you still need to make sure that the metric you use for optimization corresponds to actual business success.

In this session, I’ll discuss an innovative strategy for developing blended metrics for optimization. This methodology allows you to incorporate multiple conversion points on your site in a data-driven way—leading to faster bid optimization and higher ROI. I’ll discuss ways to identify relevant actions on your site, how to accurately gauge the value of these different activities, and how to code your site with Ad Director tracking to take advantage of this technique.

First Touch? Last Touch? Nope, Multi-Touch: Holistic Attribution Modeling

How you attribute campaign success plays a huge role in determining where you subsequently spend your marketing dollars. But crediting conversions isn’t an exact science, and without a smart solution, it’s easy to attribute success – and commit dollars – to the wrong places.

Traditional forms of attribution – such as first click and last click attribution models – fail to paint a complete picture of customer behavior and campaign success. After all, multiple touch points and long sales cycles mean “success” typically can’t be captured by just one metric.

Fortunately, with a little number-crunching, we can come up with a workable compromise. We’ll discuss how to set up a holistic, multi-touch attribution system that bridges the gap between first and last click models. We’ll show you how to configure Webtrends to accommodate this, how to pull the right numbers, and how to weight multiple conversion points so that you get accurate insights into how customers are responding to your efforts.

Landing Page Testing and Tuning

It’s not enough to get someone to click on your online ad. After all, what good is it if your visitor leaves as soon as they reach your site? Wasted visits equal wasted revenue.

The key is to test, test and test again, especially in an economy where every dollar must go further. But equally important is to test SMART. We’ll discuss the importance of using both A/B AND multivariate testing to get the best results – in the least amount of time.

We’ll also dive into strategy and making the most out of your Webtrends implementation. What do you test? When do you test? After all, one size does not fit all. If a page works for 80% of your visitors, what can you do to convert the other 20%? We’ll show how moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach – along with employing multi-phasic testing and targeting users based on keyword cluster – can help you efficiently increase conversions and boost ROI.

Top 10 Reports from Webtrends to identify actionable insights in your data

Help I’m drowning in data!

In the old days, marketers struggled to get enough information about what was happening online. Now, the opposite is true—modern web analytics inundate us with a flood of information. But how do you know where to start? And how do you separate the actionable insights from the “nice to know”?

This session will focus on ways to use Webtrends to uncover some of the most actionable insights for your online marketing efforts. We’ll cover:

- Mining internal search data
- Identifying the best pages for testing
- Focusing reports on “top movers”
- Analyzing conversion scenarios to drive design changes
- How to optimize to revenue participation
- Geographic insights
- Analyzing referring domains
- Measuring PPC messaging

Using Webtrends data to identify where to focus usability efforts

Where does it hurt?

Budgets are tight, and resources are scarce. This session takes a look at how Webtrends data can provide you the insights you needs to focus your usability efforts in the areas that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. We’ll look at:

- How you combine usability best practices with Webtrends data to create a focused optimization strategy
- Identifying your high value visitors and concentrate on how to make them happy
- Focusing on “site leakage” and how to implement fixes
- Geographic considerations
- Know your front doors (you’ll be surprised how many visitors come in through windows…)
- The law of large numbers – know your content “big hitters”

[...] plans. Submitting your idea is fairly straightforward – just post a short synopsis on the Engage 2010 submission page for review. We’re very interested in hearing about the strategies, case studies, and notable [...]

Iterative Marketing: Optimizing the Middle
The digital landscape is one of continual change and has been for more than a decade. Yet, contemporary digital marketing employes the methods and process of the past. This means that the traditional approach of heavy up front research, long development cycles, and and post-launch optimization is no longer sufficient to guarantee success. What’s needed is a method of improving your marketing strategy as you build it.

Taking key elements from extreme programming, iterative marketing is a fairly radical departure from this traditional approach. It is based on an understanding of the nature of the medium, and the opportunities that it provides. Combining it with modern analytics and traditional discovery and research, iterative marketing breaks down the “big idea” approach to marketing into small steps done with a specific purpose, evaluates the results, adapts change to inform the next step, always building, and always learning, with the goal of maximizing business goals.

In this talk, we’ll discuss what iterative marketing is, how it works, and how it’s able to reduce risk while maximizing project goals

Why’d You Bring an iPhone to a Knife Fight? Learnings from Inside the iTunes App Store, and How Mobile Analytics Can Give You the Edge

Concepting, designing, and building an iPhone app turns out to be the easy part. Once your app is available in the store, it’s a living, breathing product. It will have prospects, customers, updates, sneaky competition, and opportunities to improve. Through our experiences, we’ve learned that life inside the iTunes App Store can be exciting, frustrating, and addicting – all at the same time.

Most importantly – we’ve learned that using mobile analytics in a strategic manner can help you manage your app better than your competition, meet your goals, and give you the advantage in a very competitive marketplace. We’ll discuss best practices for App Store submission, app/product management, and the top five ways to use mobile analytics to your advantage.