Jeremy Hutton

Well, it’s been a busy two weeks. Joy and I went down to San Jose, California and checked out the Googleplex for a 3-day GAAC get together. I got to meet fellow Google Analytics folk and talk about some of the new features and drool a little bit more over Website Optimizer - oooh A/B Testing. Great to finally meet a few other people out there who use the tool and bounce a few ideas around.

Then, flew over to DC for eMetrics 2007 where I got more than my fair share of web analytics info sessions. I got to hear the one-and-only Avinash Kaushik speak and, yeah, I’d say he’s just about everything he’s cracked up to be. I also got to hear Jim Novo speak about behavioral targeting which was all the rage this year - seemed like every other speaker was talking more about it. If you haven’t heard, demographics are out, personas are in. I’m hoping to have a blog post about this soon - hopefully at Pop but we’ll see how fast those boys can get a blog up …. no, really.

Google announced this morning that updates to the Google Analytics tool will be coming shortly.  My two highlights are that they unveiled event tracking capabilities and a more in-depth site search section within the GA Tool that allows for some better segmentation.   Some of the new updates trump what POP has already created manual work-arounds for (off-site link tracking), but overall, it’s good to see the web analytics industry progress.

At this point, my analytic experience is still pretty shallow so my comments remain fairly low level.  Hopefully as new analytics tools emerge I’ll continue to grow my analytics expertise.  In the meantime, feel free to comment and leave your feedback.

I’m in Washington DC this next week getting my marketing fix at eMetrics.  Traveling with Pop is definitely something i can get used to.  Just last week I was over at Google getting some nice Google Analytics Authorized Consultant training.  But the real kicker for me was few sessions they did about Website Optimizer.

 They are about to start the Web Analytics Association Base Camp so I gotta run!