SuperWeek.hu 2014: Wrap-up

In just one word, SuperWeek 2014 was… a-ma-zi-ng!

It is Friday the 18th of Jan, 5 days before the conference, and I am getting an email from my friend, and fellow Google Partner Academy speaker, Steen writing “are you coming to SuperWeek?”. Less than 18h later I am exchanging emails with Petra, from the org team, confirming my booking and preparing for the trip. After everything is set, I am sending an email to all our close Clients mentioning that I will miss this week’s 1:1s to attend this conference.

Changing all my plans for the week, overpaying air tickets and skipping work for 3 full days in a busy period is a significant money/time investment. SuperWeek really worth it!

So let me share you my experience and what I got away from this great conference.

The Conference #

#SPWK 2014 took place on 19-23 of Jan ’14 with the theme “data still beats opinion” and was the 4th year SPWK taking place. If you want the numbers we have: 3 full (packed!) days, 25 amazing speakers, 40 sessions, >300 attendees, and some tons of beer :)

The fact that the conference is taking place in a hotel on the hilltop, 1.5h away from Budapest, is creating a really interesting environment. 300 data-geeks staffed in a hotel in the middle of nowhere with no place to go ignites interesting discussions that builds strong relationships. When you are with the same people from the time you take your breakfast all the way through late night drinking beers (or sharing the sauna), either you want it or not, you are “bonding”.

Now as for the reason why all these people are going in the middle of nowhere for this conference, you can have a look at the speakers line and you will not have a doubt. In this list, you will see truly exceptional practitioners coming from all around the world (Europe, USA, India) to share their thoughts on all things Analytics. The international crowd and this amazing set of speakers, make SuperWeek a truly international conference.

SuperWeek is a truly international conference.

Of course, the highlight of the conference was Avinash Kaushik, the #1 Analytics (and not only) speaker in the world, as you can easily understand just from looking at the main image of SPWK website (update: now changed due to announcing the SPWK 2015). Avinash really democratised Web Analytics and getting him in Hungary really put a big fat stamp on SPWK. His presentations full of insights and completely choreographed really exceeded expectations.

All these speakers, of course were not just hanging around but gave some really great talks. Talking from high-level business concepts around Web Analytics going towards the deep levels of technical implementations. But it was not only about Analytics. It was also about SEO, Social and PPC. And this really makes sense, as Analytics is the basis for all these things and great results come always after some really insightful analysis. As we say in our company, success (in PPC and not only) does not come from the amount or frequency of changes but from spending 80% of the time in getting insights and 20% of the time acting on these.

Of course all these would never have happened without the hard work and high aspirations of Zoltan, the mastermind behind SPWK. After I met Zoltan, I tried to imagine how one could make a SPWK-like conference in Greece and what kind of effort this would take. The thought just humbled me and gave me more admiration for Zoltan.

The Main Themes #

Now leaning back and trying to see the big-picture view and the main themes around the sessions, and all the discussions that took place, I can identify 3 main themes.

1) The new tools are giving us amazing capabilities #

Whether you talk about Google Tag Manager, or more importantly about Universal Analytics, these tools help us either do our work faster and with less IT involvement, or give us previously unsatisfied measurement options, mainly through sending server-side information.

In that way, Web Analytics will be going more and more towards the CRM area (with user vs visitor focus) and BI, by integrating information form different business touch points.

2) But in order to use them, we need to “talk business” first #

New tools are great. But we should not follow the next shiny thing, especially if we have not solved the basics. The amazing analogy was given by Avinash talking about someone that wanted to do bike and was given a bike with a big turbine! He was too afraid to even ride it.

The main aspect of “talk business” is to understand the business context and plan your measurement strategy before you even start thinking about tags. This is really important. Another aspect is put your focus on the most impactful measurement and analysis, not on the most cool implementation and a great quote from Aurelie’s preso was “focus on the money”. And a great example of this could be Ravi’s use of a simple regression analysis model to predict product return rate and reduce 85.7%(!) of call center costs. And the third and final aspect of “talk business” is the focus on analysis and insight, not on the implementation. All these things seem really common-sense but are rarely practiced upon.

3) And a great way to “talk business” is #dataviz #

“Talk business” is really the way to go forward but is not easy. A big part of it is how you can convey all the value derived from this unprecedented measurement complexity and this wealth of data. This is where data visualisation comes in. We need to find new ways to visualise the information in order to be consumable by the main stakeholders and powerful enough to drive action. On that side, Casper did an interesting dataviz talk.

On the area of dataviz, the most referenced tool was D3.js, that is now Avinash’s favourite. D3 is a Javascript library that can generate amazing graphs and some of these can really add meaning to really complex data-sets. An example would be using sunburst or chord graph to visualize the the “top-conversion-path” report on Google Analytics.

D3 is also the basis for AnomalyDetection web-app, an app that you should really try! AnomalyDetection plugs into your Google Analytics account and generates an amazing visualisation for the performance differences of key metrics between time periods. (Tatvic should soon make this a paid app, so hurry!)

Some nice quotes #

Have took detailed notes and from these, I highlighted some really interesting quotes.

“customer analytics meets herd analysis, when we take one customer to identify patterns for the herd”  
(Caleb Whitmore)

“to foster change you must put a monetary value in what you do” (Aurelie Pols)

“On AdWords you need 3 things: structure, structure, structure” (Jacob Kildebogaard)

“SEO is Analytics and you can work around ‘not provided’ ” (Jeff Sauer)

“We need to make analytics useful for everyone, not just analysts” (Peter O'Neill)

“write less software, do more analysis” (Doug Hall)

“if you do not have your measurement framework on a piece of paper, then you do not know what you are doing”
“information is powerful. but it how we use that it define us.” (Avinash Kaushik)

“I think we need to talk about profit more. Profit pre visit, profit per pageview.” (Yehoshua Coren)

“How does visitor intent affect execution fo your b-model?” (Carmen Mardiros )

“we know about the problems, we know about best practices but implementation takes forever” (Tim Leighton-Boyce)

“think your display strategy, do not just adjust your creatives to image banners” (Steen Rasmussen)

Liviu
“magic happens when you are showing the right message to the right audience in the right moment” (Liviu Taloi)

“Predictive models may be a "black-box” to you. You should use them, however, it they add value" (Ravi Pathak)

“Insight is not perfect, neither should your implementation be. Don’t wait for mr right, we need mr right now.” (Rachel Sweeney)

What really stood out #

The whole thing was really great, but there are some things that really stood out for me.

My Wish-list for 2015 #

It goes without saying, that I will do my best to attend next year’s SPWK, and you should too. These are the things that I would love to see:

What you can do next #

If you have reached this point, possibly you also #lovedata. What I would do next?

And of course, try to add value every single day through data!

 
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