After a long flight from Portland > Minneapolis > Amsterdam > Helsinki I finally arrived at my first destination in Europe: Global headquarters of Satama, a leading European digital services company with a global clientèle and an energetic, insight-oriented crew and authors of Captain Blackbeak’s Blog (arrrrr!) I didn’t mention Satama in my last post because the event tomorrow is private for a select list of roughly 70 Satama clients and prospects.

I’ve known some of the Satama crew for awhile now online but it was nice to put names with faces! Here are a few of those faces so you can play along at home:

Mikko Isoniemi, Business Unit Director for Analytics, and Steve Jackson, Senior Consultant for Analytics

Janne Korpi, Project Manager and Team Leader for Analytics

Many of the Satama crew, including Mia Luostarinen (front left) who provided invaluable help getting me to Helsinki!

I’m very much looking forward to meeting Satama clients tomorrow at the presentation, after which Steve, Mikko, and I will be heading directly to Stockholm, Sweden for Lars Johansson’s totally sold-out Web Analytics Wednesday event!

I’ve blogged about my travel schedule a few times but tomorrow I’m heading out on the official “Web Analytics Demystified World Tour” and I’d love to catch up with my blog readers if you’re coming to any of the following events:

• Tuesday, September 11th I will be with the great Lars Johansson at the totally sold out Web Analytics Wednesday event in Stockholm, Sweden.  This event is co-sponsored by the nice folks at WebTrends, Omniture, and IndexTools and promises to be a full-evening of web analytics “demystification” for the 80+ folks who will be in attendance.  I will be giving my “Web Analytics is Easy!” presentation and then we’ll have a panel of experts that includes Dennis Mortenson of IndexTools, Ian Tickle from WebTrends, Steve Jackson from Satama, and Magnus Hultman from Omniture.  Despite this event being sold out/standing room only, you can still contact Lars about getting on the wait list.
• Thursday, September 13th I will be presenting at e.Day 2007 in Rotterdam Holland.  I’m excited about presenting at e.Day since I will be working along side industry giants like Biz Stone (Twitter), Rolf Skyberg (eBay), Martin Stiksel (Last FM), Sep Kamvar (iGoogle), and Mark Fletcher (Startupping.com but you may know him as the founder of Bloglines)  You can see the entire line up of speakers at the e.Day web site.
• Friday, September 14th I will be presenting three times at OX2’s Web Analytics Day in Brussels, Belgium.  I am hugely excited about this event since I will get to hang out with my good friends Rene, Aurelie, David Rhee, and even Ian Thomas from Microsoft who will be on hand to give the first public demo of Microsoft Gatineau.  Some great news that you may not have already read is that WEB ANALYTICS DAY IS NOW TOTALLY FREE for practitioners of web analytics.  Yep, thanks to the generosity of the sponsors, practitioners can join us at no charge and consultants pay only a small fee to attend this event that is sure to be talked about in Europe for years to come.  I hope you’ll join me in Brussels!

When I get home from Europe I will have barely enough time to clean my clothes and catch up on email before heading right back out on the road, this time in the American West.

• Tuesday, September 18th I will be leading the Advanced Analytics workshop at Shop.ORG in Las Vegas, Nevada, working again with my good friend and former co-worker Patti Freeman-Evans of JupiterResearch.  Those of you who have been to Shop.ORG in the past know what an excellent event this is and how much fun it will be in Las Vegas.  Patti and I will be giving short presentations and then we’ll be leading an expert practitioner panel that features my good friends Dylan Lewis from TurboTax, Kim Weller from Circuit City, and Michael Fried from Backcountry.com.  If you’re coming to Shop.ORG, please join us in the Advanced Analytics session!
• Thursday, September 20th I will be giving the keynote presentation at SEMphonic X Change in Napa Valley, California.  I am hugely honored to have been asked to present the keynote at this event, especially considering the rock star lineup that will be on hand to run “huddles” and help make X Change a unique event in the web analytics community.  If you haven’t already decided to go to X Change and would like to join us, send me an email and I’ll gladly help you save 15% off the cost of attending.

If you have any questions about how to hook up with me at any of these presentations, please don’t hesitate to write.  I always love meeting my book and blog readers in person and am always happy to sign copies of Web Analytics Demystified and Web Site Measurement Hacks if you bring them along.

See you on the tour!

I have been patiently and politely holding my tongue for quite awhile now waiting to say CONGRATULATIONS to both Jennifer Veesenmeyer and June Dershewitz on the career changes they recently made!

Jennifer has joined the already great team at Stratigent as a Senior Web Analytics Consultant, bringing her experience and very well-liked presentation technique (highest scoring presentation at Emetrics, ever, I read!) to Stratigent and their clients. I missed Jennifer’s PIMP my Reports presentation (which apparently she doesn’t own the rights to, too bad!) but heard only amazing things about it. She and I are presenting together at Emetrics so that should be fun!
June has joined Gary Angel and the team at SEMphonic as Vice President of Analytics! I’ve written about June in the past, citing her as one of my personal heroes and the inspiration for Web Analytics Wednesday. June and I even talked about her joining me as a partner at Web Analytics Demystified but alas, the timing was not quite right. Thusly I am thrilled that she has joined another of my favorite people, Gary Angel, bringing her significant expertise to SEMphonic clients.

Both Stratigent and SEMphonic are Web Analytics Demystified business partners so this news is even better since my clients will eventually be able to benefit from Jennifer and June’s greatness as well. Win-win-win!

Congrats to Josh Manion and Gary Angel on adding these very talented professionals to their teams.

It used to be that there was basically one conference we would all go to, year after year, and gather to geek out on the subject of web analytics — Jim Sterne’s Emetrics Summit. It was held in one of the nicest hotels in the U.S., it had the best host, and attracted the best presenters in the business year-over-year. And, to Jim’s credit, Emetrics continues to be a “must attend” event for everyone in the industry serious about networking and seeing some pretty sharp presentations. I have no doubt that as Jim and Matthew evolve Emetrics into the new “Marketing Optimization Summit” that the crowd will grow and I will continue to be amazed at how the measurement sector is evolving.

But times change and inevitably new conferences spring up. The two that I am personally most excited about are happening this September, one in Brussels and the other in Napa Valley.

First, on Friday, September 14th in Brussels, Belgium I will be joining my good friends Rene and Aurelie from OX2 at the Second Web Analytics Day! For those of you who don’t know Rene and Aurelie, man, you simply must come to Belgium and meet them both. We’ll be joined by Stephan Loerke from the World Federation of Advertisers and W. David Rhee, formerly of Gateway Computers and the man basically making everything happen at the Web Analytics Forum lately.

This event promises to be a great time and I strongly encourage all web analytics professionals from around Europe to come to this event! As an added incentive for non-Belgians to travel to the event, I will offer two-hours of free phone (or SKYPE)-based web analytics consulting and signed copies of Web Analytics Demystified and Web Site Measurement Hacks to the individual who travels the furthest (measured in KM, of course) to the event.

I mean hey, I’m coming from over 5,000 miles away!

Second, on Thursday, September 20th in Napa Valley, California, I will be joining a huge cast of well-known characters in the web analytics industry at SEMphonic’s first ever “X Change” conference. Well before I left Visual Sciences, Gary Angel asked me to deliver the keynote speech at this event, something I am hugely honored to be doing. Since that time, Gary has added a ton of wonderful speakers to the roster, leading “huddles” on a variety of subjects — and I love the idea of small group sessions and less-formal conversations, what a fantastic approach to getting industry veterans to share their ideas!

At X Change I’ll be joined by great minds like Matt Belkin from Omniture, Aaron Gray from WebTrends, Terry Cohen from Digitas, Jacques Warren of WAO Marketing, my former co-worker Olivier Silvestre from WebSideStory, and too many more great people to name. It’s funny because Gary is more or less getting a similar cast of presenters that Jim had back in the second and third years at Emetrics and doing so in wine country — brilliant!!!

X Change is held back-to-back with Shop.ORG (to-back with my trip to Europe) and so I’m pretty pumped up to deliver what I hope will be an extraordinarily memorable keynote speech.

I hope you’ll join me in Europe at OX2’s Web Analytics Day and in Napa Valley at SEMphonic’s X Change.

I’ve never been much for listening to podcasts for some reason but all the sudden I seem to be listening to them all the time. Last week it was Bryan’s interview with Avinash Kaushik from ZQInsights. This week it’s Lars Johansson, the Swedish coordinator for WAA, talking to seven of the brightest minds in web analytics in Europe.

Having recently been to Europe, I was delighted to listen to this conversation. While in Holland I presented data (links to a PDF) showing that European web analytics practitioners are not far behind their U.S. counterparts. When you listen to the podcast you’ll hear the participant’s talking about nearly the exact same challenges we all face here in the U.S. Concerns about process, distribution of decision making (Aurelie talks about pan-European companies, essentially multiple divisions but that speak different languages, have different values and expectations, etc.)

This is a long podcast but well worth a listen if you have time. Great work, Lars, bringing these bright minds together for the conversation.