Archive for 'Web Analytics Demystified Partners'

Adam, John, and I are incredibly excited to announce that industry veteran Brian Hawkins is joining Web Analytics Demystified to help us expand our offerings around testing, optimization, and personalization of all forms of digital communication. Brian is the most widely recognized expert in the field when it comes to Enterprise-class optimization and personalization technology, integration, and strategy. He comes to us from Offermatica by way of Omniture and Adobe, and we are delighted to build on our support for Adobe’s solutions, adding Brian’s expertise on Test&Target to Adam’s SiteCatalyst-related offerings.

Brian’s offerings at Demystified will look a lot like Adam’s — audits of current implementations, strategic planning for testing and optimization readiness, systems integration architecture and support, and planning support for the entire end-to-end process of site and application optimization in the Enterprise. While Brian’s technology expertise is strongest on Test&Target, his knowledge of what it takes from a teams, governance, and process perspective to be successful transcends platforms and I believe will incredibly valuable to any large business trying to become agile in their optimization efforts.

Brian is taking a little time off before getting started mid-month but I will be adding his blog, a description of his offerings, and more about him to the site very soon. Clients are welcome to contact us directly to set up time to meet Brian (and if you’re not a client you can call too, that is if you have any interest in testing, optimization, or personalization.)

Brian will be with us at Emetrics, Adobe’s Summit in Salt Lake City, and of course he will be presenting at our own ACCELERATE event in Chicago on April 4th. If you’re at any of these events and would like to meet or connect with Brian, please drop me a note.

We hope you will join us in welcoming Brian to the team.

Wow, I just got done looking more closely at the Web Analytics Demystified team calendar for the next few months and it is a doozy! Chances are if you live in the U.S. and do any type of digital measurement, analysis, or optimization professionally we are going to see you between now and the end of March.

If that is the case, we’d like to buy you a drink!

Despite each of us presenting, often multiple times, we are always happy to make time for our clients and potential clients when we are out-and-about.  If you realize you’re going to be at one of the following events why not drop us a line and we’ll see if we can connect. Who knows, maybe we’re planning a great party or something …

• On Tuesday, February 8th, Adam will be at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, California. Adam is presenting at 11 AM so look for him in the Conversion (B2B/B2C) track
• On Wednesday, February 16th, Adam and I will both be in Minneapolis at a special Web Analytics Wednesday event at Glueks downtown. If you’re in the Twin Cities register here to join us for drinks!
• From Tuesday, March 1st to Thursday, March 3rd, Adam and John will be at Webtrends Engage in San Francisco.
• From Tuesday, March 8th to Thursday, March 10th, all three of us will be at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah. Adam is presenting in the “Analytics All Stars” track.
• From Monday, March 14th to Wednesday, March 16th, all three of us will be at the venerable Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco. The three of us are presenting throughout the conference but I’m most excited about my keynote with Lynn Lanphier from Best Buy on Tuesday, March 15th.
• I will in San Jose on Friday, March 25th, delivering the keynote presentation at the SDForum annual analytics conference (details still coming.)

After all that the three of us are going to slink home to our loved ones and try and convince them we are in fact their fathers, husbands, and sons.

Seriously, though, we never get enough opportunities to meet with partners, friends, and prospects at these events so if you’d like to meet with any or all of us please drop us a line sooner than later so that we can block time and make plans.

By now I hope you have heard that Adam Greco is joining John and I as a Senior Partner in Web Analytics Demystified. While his official start date isn’t still for a few weeks he’s already on the road as part of the Demystified team. If you’d like to meet Adam in person and talk with him about the practice he is building there are a few places I just happened to know he will be in the coming months:

• Adam will be participating in the Web Analytics Association (WAA) Symposium in Austin, Texas on Monday, January 24th. Adam is talking about integrating web analytics and CRM which is core to his practice area given his past work at Salesforce.com and Omniture.
• Adam will also be presenting at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, California on Tuesday, February 8th. He’ll be giving the same presentation on web analytics and CRM, discussing how to move marketing analytics from the server room to the board room.
• Adam will also be joining me in Minneapolis on Wednesday, February 16th for a special Web Analytics Wednesday sponsored by our good friends at SiteSpect and with the generous help from our friends at Stratigent.  We don’t have the details on the site yet but the event will be downtown Minneapolis and Adam and I will be doing some prognostication and fielding questions from Twin Cities locals.

Adam will also be at Webtrends Engage, Adobe’s Omniture Summit, and the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit but we’ll post more on that when additional details emerge.  Suffice to say Adam will be busy in his first few months on the job.

If you haven’t met Adam I would encourage you to head out to one of these events and introduce yourself. Especially if you’re a marketer and are considering the Online Marketing Summit — if you haven’t been to OMS you really need to go.  Every year I am absolutely blown away by the job that Aaron Kahlow and the OMS team do bringing that conference together.  OMS draws amazing speakers, amazing sponsors, and most importantly amazing conference participants and delivers an absolute fire-hose of information.

I’m sincerely bummed that Adam is taking my place at OMS this year — I haven’t actually missed a big OMS event in California ever — but I am confident that the audience will benefit greatly from Adam’s message about CRM integration, his direct experience at Salesforce.com, and his distinct presentation style.

I suspect by now many of you have noticed but this week we made two pretty amazing announcements here at Web Analytics Demystified. Now that the dust is settling I have some time to take a step back and offer up some comments on the announcements and what I believe they mean for our clients, our prospects, and the web analytics industry in general.

On Tuesday we announced that respected industry veteran Adam Greco had joined John and I as a Senior Partner. Adam is well-known to many in our community thanks to his high-visibility work during his tenure at Omniture, his popular “Omni-Man” blog, and his fine, fine work on the Beyond Web Analytics podcast series.

For John and I bringing Adam on board was a no-brainer. The guy is as bright as they come, he is articulate, and most importantly he knows how to squeeze every last drop of value out of the most widely deployed digital measurement solutions in use today — Adobe SiteCatayst and Google Analytics. Adam is committed to extending that expertise to all of the popular platforms as quickly as possible, and our hope is that by mid-year he will be providing the same great insights he has for SiteCatalyst to Webtrends, Unica, Coremetrics, Nedstat, and other customers.

Adam will be running our Operational Use Audit and Framework Development practice as well as providing custom training and generally supporting the rest of the Demystified service offerings.  Which brings me to our second announcement …

On Wednesday we announced an exclusive partnership with tactical and technical consulting practice leaders Keystone Solutions. Keystone is a slightly better-kept secret than Adam Greco, although their current clients certainly know who they are. Founded years ago by former Omniture super-star Matthew Gellis, Keystone has grown into a talent magnet comprable to, well, Web Analytics Demystified.  Matt Wright from HP, Kurt Slater from Expedia, Rudi Schumpert from Ariba, and a host of other amazing analytics technicians.

We have doubled-down with Keystone for one simple reason: in our experience they are the best of the best when it comes to providing fundamental and foundational support for any digital measurement practice. Especially against those same two “most popular” solutions — Google Analytics and Adobe SiteCatalyst — Keystone delivers in a way that few others out there are capable, and that is the kind of talent we prefer to work with in the field.

Through this partnership Web Analytics Demystified clients will be able to benefit from a dramatically expanded set of web analytics consulting service offerings ranging from on-the-ground implementation support to ongoing reporting and analysis to some pretty amazing custom solutions. They will also be taking the lead on our Tag Management Systems Audit and Deployment practice, an offering I expect to be red-hot in 2011 and beyond.

Now, unfortunate as it is, we were not able to pursue this type of relationship with Keystone without some cost. The immediate fall-out is that Web Analytics Demystified will no longer be participating in the X Change conference. While this breaks my heart after having put three years of sweat equity into the event, relationships change and so it is time to move on.

I do, however, promise every one of the hundreds of consultants, vendors, and practitioners we have personally invited to this conference over the past three years that we will be back, live and in-person, with something far more “Demystified” in nature. Based on our work with Web Analytics Wednesday, the Analysis Exchange, and hundreds of other events around the globe, we have a pretty good idea of what is truly missing from the web analytics event landscape … and now, thanks to Adam and the team at Keystone, we have the means to deliver.

I welcome your comments and questions about both pieces of news, and I hope you’ll keep your eyes open in the coming few weeks for even more news from our growing company. It is exciting times, indeed.

I am very sorry to say that our European partner Aurelie Pols has decided to leave Web Analytics Demystified and pursue other goals in her life. While I am very sad to announce this, I have certainly enjoyed working with Aurelie over the past year and on behalf of myself, my family, and our partner John Lovett we wish Aurelie, Rene, and little Luca all the best.