Yep, it’s that time of the year again, time for my bi- (soon to be tri-) annual pilgrimage to Europe to meet with some of the best and the brightest overseas. I’m very excited about this trip for a handful of reasons:

1. The trip begins in London next Monday at what is likely to be the largest event in the history of Web Analytics Wednesday. Thanks to the fine folks from SCL Analytics and Unica and a little support from E-Consultancy there are currently 128 people registered to attend the event! London has always been a hotbed of WAW activity and this is my first time attending the event. I’ll be giving a short presentation on “The Future of Web Analytics” and taking questions from the audience.
2. On Tuesday I will be presenting at Nedstat’s “Streaming Media on the Move” event at London’s Soho Hotel and talking about the white paper I recently authored with Nedstat’s Chief of Innovation and how measurement is changing in a Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 world.
3. Wednesday and Thursday I will be in Amsterdam doing private presentations. Over the years I have grown to love the beauty, culture, and diversity Amsterdam has to offer (despite the presence of what Aurelie lovingly refers to as “the narcotourists!”)
4. Friday I will be in Brussels, Belgium with the fine folks at OX2 giving a private presentation and participating in another special Web Analytics Wednesday event (albeit a somewhat smaller affair)
5. The following Monday I will be in Helsinki, Finland working with my partner Trainer’s House/Satama and giving a presentation on Measuring Lead Generation site. The folks at Satama are great to work with and I’m very excited about getting to spend more than 18 hours in Helsinki this time …
6. Back to London on the 8th for some client work and home on the 9th. Phew!

If you’re in or near London or Brussels I’d love to meet you at one of the Web Analytics Wednesday events. I suspect I will also have a little free time in Amsterdam and Helsinki so if you’d like to meet in one of those cities, please feel free to drop me a line and we can try and meet!

I am incredibly honored to be able to announce that Web Analytics Demystified has partnered with the fine folks at Semphonic to present X Change 2008 in San Francisco at the Ritz Carlton, August 18 and 19, 2008.

In my decade in the web analytics industry I have attended and presented at hundreds of events around the world. While each have their own unique value proposition and are truly great in their own way, X Change is the only conference I left both completely energized about our industry and actively scheming about how I could become more involved in presenting the event. I said as much after last year’s event.

You can read more in the press release but here’s what you’re not going to read in the release:

• For me, X Change was like no conference I’ve ever attended as a practitioner, consultant, analyst, or business owner. At the end of the day I didn’t want the conversation to end!
• The key is the “huddles”: far more structured than “birds of a feather” sessions or round tables, yet informal enough to encourage everyone to participate, and loaded with analytics experience and talent.
• The small size of the conference is intentional, and Gary, Joel, and I are working to bring some of biggest brains and folks working on the most exciting projects out there to participate. The net result is an amazing ratio of experts per attendee.
• No booths, no vendor pitches, no literature you don’t want under your door. At least last year, the vendor representatives were senior people working at the top of their game (folks like Matt Belkin, Olivier Silvestre, Aaron Gray, Rand Schulman, etc.)
• More web analytics bloggers per capita than any conference ever thrown. (Okay, maybe that isn’t really a selling point but it led to a lot of really good PR …)

Again, I am incredibly pleased with Gary and Joel’s decision to allow Web Analytics Demystified a greater level of participation in the event this year. If you’re a long-time reader of my blog and would like more information about X Change, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly.

I hope to see you in San Francisco in August!

Gary Angel and the folks at SEMphonic have just launched five more must read web analytics blogs. Check out Gary’s post and subscribe to new web analytics blogs from great people like Joel Hadary, Paul Legutko, Phil Kemelor, June Dershewitz and Jesse Gross. While it’s no secret I am a huge fan of June Dershewitz, I’m very excited after the recent X Change conference to read Joel, Paul, Phil, and Jesse’s work as well.

Props to Gary for getting this uniquely talented crew to share their ideas and experiences. Even if he did call me a monolith, I still appreciate what Gary and Joel are trying to do for the entire web analytics community.

Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of attending SEMphonic’s first ever X Change conference. My friend Gary Angel asked me to give the keynote speech and lead a “huddle” on the processes involved in doing web analytics. As I posted back in August, I was pretty excited about the event because of the format SEMphonic had selected — building the event around small-group interactions rather than the “big room, talk-at-you-not-to-you” format so common in conferences today.

Not that I have anything against big conferences, Jim Sterne’s formerly-called-the-Emetrics Summit is still my favorite conference of all time even thought it will probably grow past 600 in Washington next month, and I had a blast at both Shop.ORG (2000+) and Holland’s E-Day (1500+) and hope to be invited to Internet Retailer’s event in Chicago next summer (rumored to be 5000+). But in my experience big conferences actually limit what you’re able to learn if you’re a face-to-face communicator like me. I always end up having short conversations with people in the hallways between presentations or at social events, and the really deep stuff ends up happening in the proverbial (and real!) lobby bar.

SEMphonic X Change was different.

The huddles more-or-less forced us all to expand on our ideas and share our experiences. The one I led on process was great (I thought) and I ended up agreeing to print and produce “NO TAGS, NO TRACKING” t-shirts for all 15 people in the room. But I was absolutely blown away by the huddles I attended:

• Terry Cohen of Digitas, leading a conversation about measuring engagement that covered how engagement can be measured from the microscopic to the macroscopic level.
• Joseph Carrabis of NextStage, leading a conversation about attitudes and communication
• Matt Belkin of Omniture, leading a conversation about combining online and offline data
• Aaron Gray of WebTrends, leading a conversation about using behavioral data (an EXCELLENT huddle IMHO!)

Think about it: Four huddles led by four of the brightest minds in measurement today (okay, three, since Joseph explicitly states that he’s not a measurement wonk like the rest of us, but he’s the biggest thinker I know …) and there were only 10 people in the conversation on average.

How cool is that?

Not all the huddles were apparently as good as the four I attended, but overall everyone I talked to was quite impressed with the format. And everyone I talked to agreed that they would be back at X Change next year (providing Gary and Joel have the event, which I certainly hope they do!)

I strongly recommend that you consider SEMphonic X Change next year if your schedule permits, especially if you’re an opinionated measurement wonk who isn’t afraid to spout off about stuff they believe to be important (yes Ian, you.)

On that point, this event would have been even better if just a few more people would have made the trip, thought-leaders like Avinash Kaushik (shockingly absent, despite being able to basically walk to Napa from his house if you’re in shape), Brett Crosby from Google Analytics, the Jims (Novo and Sterne), at least one Eisenberg (they sent JQvT instead), Stephane Hamel (budget constraints), Rene and Aurelie, Steve Jackson, the aforementioned Ian, and probably a few dozen more people I’m forgetting, apologies!

I say this because I really believe what I said in my keynote:

Collectively “we” are the web analytics industry.

The vendors are not the industry, the Web Analytics Association is not the industry, all of us are the web analytics industry, and collectively we need to debate and discuss what this industry is going to become. But I don’t believe we can make the decisions necessary in the Yahoo! group, on phone calls, or over email. We need to sit down, face-to-face-to-face and talk about standards, debate definitions, compare notes, and use our old fashioned “Web 0.0″ skills to hash out some of the really hard stuff that remains left to tackle.

Jacques Warren made a similar comment in my call for the WAA to “do something” with their recently published standards document and he is spot-on correct. Web analytics is hard, and it isn’t going to get any easier if we just sit and listen. Let’s sit and talk, let’s debate, let’s act.

’nuff said.

I’ll leave you with this parting shot about X Change, a comparison I’m shocked that nobody smarter than I has already made:

• Emetrics is the Web 1.0 conference for web analytics where you will learn a ton and be very happy
• X Change is the Web 2.0 conference for web analytics where you will contribute a ton and be very satisfied

Mad props to Gary, Joel, Grace, Barbara, Phil, June, and everyone else at SEMphonic for throwing such an amazing event!

I’ve been so busy I haven’t had enough time to write about some pretty important stuff that my company has been up to lately. Perhaps the most important is the recently announced partnership between Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. and Europe’s Satama Interactive. For those of you who don’t know of Satama, you should. Not only are they one of the premier interactive agencies in all of Europe, but they are evangelizing a “performance marketing” message that emphasizes the value of measurement to all online marketing efforts.

Plus, they’re the cool folks who publish the Blackbeak Blog … and, as I mentioned in my post on my trip to Helsinki, Finland, they’re incredibly nice people as well!

I’m hugely excited to be working with Mikko, Steve, Janne, Mia and the entire measurement team at Satama, and I hope our combined clients and prospects are excited as well. If you’re a Satama client in Europe or in the U.S., and you’d like to learn more about how this partnership can benefit your use of measurement tools, please contact your local account manager or write to me directly and I’ll get you connected.