Those of you reading this blog and coming to WebSideStory’s ActiveInsights conference at the Lowes Hotel in Santa Monica should look for me on-and-off over the next few days. I hope to make the cocktail reception Tuesday night, a few of the presentations and then I’m doing a training session on Thursday morning covering how companies use web analytics applications and the use of key performance indicators as a strategy for driving internal adoption of web metrics.

If you see me, come say hello! I realized at Emetrics when a table full of people cornered me to comment on the fact that I pretty much always wear tan shirts when I present that I’m approachable. At least I try to be.

(I didn’t bring a tan shirt to ActiveInsights.)

Phew, home again, at least for a few days. Now that I’ve had some time to digest the presentations and conversations from Santa Barbara, here are some of my personal highlights:

• Clint Ivy from Disney’s presentation on “Instant Cognition” and dashboard design. Frankly, despite knowing Clint for nearly five years, I was blown away by his direct approach to dashboard design. Clint provided sage advice about how to get higher-ups to grok key performance indicators and metrics. If you’re not reading Clint’s blog, you should be.
• Amanda Kahlow, one of my co-worker’s at Visual Sciences, gave a great presentation about how she’s helped Cisco do web analytics and included a handful of interesting case studies including an overview of how Cisco uses Visual Sciences to measure their first-party cookie deletion rate. While some people irresponsibly call for the end of unique visitors as a relevant business metric, Amanda followed the best practices guidance and helped Cisco actually measure their deletion rate so they could better understand the uniqueness of their audience.
• Avinash Kausik from Intuit gave another powerful but funny presentation about how Intuit uses the “Trinity” approach to measuring their web sites in the context of business data and the voice of the customer (VOC). Of all the folks I’ve seen present on the subject of web analytics, Avinash is one of the best. Watching him rip on the notion of “Daily Unique Visitors” from the stage nearly brought tears to my eyes …
• Josh Manion from Stratigent gave a great presentation on how he’d helped Peapod implement a sophisticated multi-channel analytics system that incorporated web data with customer data and data collected in their physical stores (from GPS units mounted on shopping carts no less!) Josh’s style is pretty laid back but he managed to get the audience thinking about the multiple sources of data they have throughout their enterprise.
• Jim Novo from The Drilling Down Project gave a thoughtful presentation on recency and how to better connect with your customers. While I’d seen this presentation before, again I found myself wondering why I don’t do more to sell books to people who have just either A) bought another book or B) requested something from my site.
• Bob Page from Yahoo! talked about Web Analytics Ethics and managed to scare us all by forcing us to consider what it would be like for the Federal Government to mandate how we collected data via the Internet and how that data could be used. Scary stuff indeed!

Aside from these great presentations, I was pretty much floored by the quality of conversations I had with attendees. Whether I was waxing philosophical about the marketplace with the guys from ZAAZ by the pool, getting an earful from some members of the Yahoo! group about how I only wear tan shirts when I present or explaining the “Don’t Be a Fred” pins that I’d passed out to a handful of good friends, I was absolutely amazed at how the web analytics community has evolved over just the past year.

One thing worth mentioning, our host Jim Sterne gave me a few minutes to address the conference before dinner on Wednesday night (a special “Web Analytics Wednesday” event!) and I told the crowd there that the Yahoo! group was being transfered to the Web Analytics Association so that I could focus my time on other things that will support the larger web analytics community. If you’re a member of the group, expect to see some messaging from the groups new moderators in the next few days about guidelines for participation and a brief introduction to the moderators.

All in all this year’s Emetrics was easily the best for me and for pretty much everyone I talked to. If you were there, what did you think?

Well Emetrics 2006 is now over and what a week it was. Having attended all five of these events I have to say this year was something truly different. I have copious notes and a bunch of photos of web analytics luminaries but alas, I have to pack the kids and head home. I hope to get my summary up over the weekend. In the meantime, several other of the bloggers who were at the conference have already posted stuff including Mike Keyes, Robbin Steif and Clint Ivy.

Well, I made it to the Biltmore in beautiful Santa Barbara and after a nice dinner with my in-laws I poked around the conference room only to discover poor cell phone reception and no cell-based Internet access (Verizon, can you hear me now?) So, my grand plans to blog Emetrics as it happens seem unlikely to materialize. Instead I’ll take copious notes and try and carve out time to upload them, especially since according to our host, Jim Sterne, this is the last year (for real this time) we’ll be at the beautiful Biltmore. Jim showed me the room — gone are the round tables and copious free space at the back of the room. Now we’re in rows, all 200 of us, with standing room in the back.

How far we’ve come in five short years. Why, it seems like only yesterday when it was Jim, Terry Lund, me and 50 or so others trying to fill this cavern of a room. Now Sterne has a complete sell-out and the hotel is overrun by web analytics folks (I spotted Shane Atchinson/ZAAZ drinking something from a Chilhully-looking goblet as I walked my daughter back from the beach …)

Crazy.

In fact, further evidence of the popularity of the subject, and I kid you not, I actually saw Kerry Kim from Intel reading Web Analytics Demystified on the airplane on the way down from Portland. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen someone actually reading the book in a public place.

I guess web analytics is happening now. Go figure.

For those of you who cannot make next week’s SOLD OUT Emetrics event in Santa Barbara, California, all is not lost. Providing I can get my EV phone to work from the Biltmore, I’m going to try and blog summaries of each presentation as they happen. If you’re interested, keep an eye on this weblog.