Next week I am delighted to be delivering the keynote speech at the Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) in Vancouver, British Columbia.  I will be giving a new presentation titled “Competing on Web Analytics” that applies the wisdom that Tom Davenport originally outlined in his best selling Harvard Business Review reprint to the work we do in the online channel.

I’m also excited to be going to IMC because there are a ton of great speakers in the line up, folks like my old friend Xavier Casanova from Liveclicker, Gary Angel from Semphonic, Anil Batra (who just became a father, congrats Anil!) from ZeroDash1, and Tom Leung from Google who I have never seen speak but have heard good things about.

If you plan on being at IMC and would like to set aside some time to meet or catch up, please feel free to email me directly and we can plan a time.

Those of you living in or near The Rose City are hopefully aware that Aaron Kahlow’s Online Marketing Summit is coming to town next Tuesday.  What you may not be aware of is that I will be presenting at 10:45 AM on the topic of “Competing on Web Analytics” and both Aaron and I would love it if you’d come out to OMS.  Aaron has provided me with some free passes and discount codes for my local readers who want to join the festivities — if you’re interested in either please write me directly and I’ll hook you up!

Learn more about OMS Portland and register to join us today!

Since I am on the record as being supportive of the web analytics community around the world I wanted to make European readers aware of a webcast I will be doing next week.  Coremetrics has asked me to reprise the presentation I did on measuring visitor engagement that I did at their client summit last Fall.  The good news (for Europeans) is that the webcast is open to everyone and will be presented at 10 AM London time!

You can register for this free event at WebEx.

For those of you who can’t make the event because of holiday, or because like me the presentation will happen while you would normally be asleep, I am told that Coremetrics will be recording the presentation.  Assuming I am coherent at 2 AM my time and the recording comes of well, you should be able to download the webcast within the next few weeks at the Coremetrics web site.

I hope those of you in the European web analytics community will be able to join us next week.  I will try and leave plenty of time for questions and answers as well.

Things are starting to heat up for the X Change conference in August (17, 18, 19 in San Francisco … more details here) with two announcements made this week and last.

First, we’ve announced the X Change Scholarship program which will allow us to encourage and promote the innovative use of web analytics for improving web site performance. Our goal with the scholarship is to help one deserving web analytics practitioner join us at the X Change free of charge; all we’re asking is for a well written essay describing a great use of web analytics. You can read the details here and I’m happy to answer questions directly as well if you’re interested in applying for the Scholarship funding.

Second, we’re starting to announce more about the content of the 2008 X Change beginning with the news that the conference keynote will be a “Town Hall” type event with three of the most respected industry analysts in the business today: Megan Burns from Forrester, Bill Gassman from Gartner, and John Lovett from JupiterResearch. Gary and I will be facilitating a discussion between X Change attendees and these three analytics insiders to help get to the bottom of the relationship between people, process, and technology.

As I’ve said before, X Change is like no web analytics conference you’ve ever attended (unless you went to X Change last year …) If you’re really interested in web analytics, I hope you’ll come to San Francisco and join us in August!

The nice folks at Elastic Path asked me awhile back to give a presentation on web analytics for online retailers.  Their request made me realize I am still sitting on data I collected last Fall — a mistake I know but a function of the velocity at which Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. has grown in the past year.  To make up for this delay in some small way I will be sharing the data I collected from online retailers in a free webcast this coming Thursday.

If you’re an online retailer doing web analytics please consider spending an hour with us Thursday at 9:00 AM Pacific / Noon Eastern.  Among other things I will be covering:

• What the measurement landscape looks like for online retailers
• How satisfied online retailers are with their web analytics vendors
• How web analytics has impacted spend on paid search marketing

This last point I think many of you will find especially interesting.  Given Yahoo’s recent (re)entry into the web analytics market, and the assertion from Google that Google Analytics drives sites to spend more on search marketing, I set out to answer the question “Do you spend more on paid search marketing because of information gained via web analytics?”

Tune in Thursday morning to hear what I found out.

You can register now for free thanks to Elastic Path.  Talk to you Thursday!