Omniture Summit 2010 Recap

While flights were delayed getting into Salt Lake City on opening day, we made it in time for the opening reception.  This year’s Summit was attended by 2,000 hard-core Omniture clients. The reception was packed.  There was a who’s who amongst Omniture partners in the showcase, including ExactTarget, Responsys, Experian, ClickZ, 24/7 Media, SilverPop, and more.

General Sessions

Opening general session on Wednesday was led by Josh James, former CEO of Omniture, now Senior Vice President and General Manager, Omniture Business Unit.  The theme of the entire conference was the future of online marketing…the next digital decade. Josh foresees a future of the green marketing button, where technology will exist that will be able to distribute online advertising based on the marketer’s inputs, like ROI, conversion rate, target audience.  It will be like Staples Easy Button – you tell the technology what you want, and it will figure out where/how to do the advertising.

There was a big focus on mobile and social media in this general session. Some pretty astounding stats:

·         By 2014 Smartphone will overtake the number of PCs/notebooks

·         Within 3 years mobile web will be four times the size of current desktop web

·         Over 35% of people browse from a Smartphone daily

·         Only 14% of teenagers use email today

·         Facebook users have an average of 130 friends

·         50% of users come to the Facebook site every day

·         The 35+ age group is the fastest growing demographic on Facebook

Speaking of social media, for 120 character sound bites of play-by-play highlights of the event, check out the #omtrsummit hashtag on Twitter, or videos on YouTube.  Omniture helped attendees become more social by alleviating the need for business card exchanges.  Upon check-in for the event, each attendee was provided with a poken – a USB flash drive that is used as a handshake with other attendees.  Attendees create a poken profile online with all pertinent contact info, including picture and all social network info.  It keeps track of your poken people in a timeline of when you pokened.  It’s a very cool tool, and a lot easier to keep track of instead of business cards.

Next, big Omniture announcement: Omniture and Facebook now have a strategic partnership.  The SearchCenter product will now integrate with Facebook advertising platform.  Additionally, if sites use Facebook Connect, they will be able to use the Omniture Genesis platform to integrate data into SiteCatalyst.  Once a Facebook user has granted Connect permissions to a company, SiteCatalyst will be able to show stats such as number of friends, hometown, gender, marital status.  Using the Test&Target product, companies can use this data to target these specific demographics with much more personalized content and offers.

Some other Omniture product announcements: Test&Target will now support Flash.  This means that flash elements of websites can now also be multivariate tested and specifically targeted to audiences based on a plethora of available demographic data.  Additionally, it will now integrate with a number of display ad networks.  This is a huge benefit to companies spending significant money in display ads.  Instead of sending a file to the ad network, companies using this technology will send a link to the Omniture hosted ad files.  Test&Target will dynamically be able to test and target ads based on the advertisers specifications for conversion rate, revenue, or any other success event specified in the tool.  This will allow advertisers to see which creatives work best with which demographics and which landing pages.  The possibilities are endless.

Thursday morning’s general session was led by the famous Seth Godin.  It would have been worth the price of admission to the Summit just to see this presentation.  His focus was on becoming indispensible in the world of interchangeable, dispensable companies and workers.  His goal was to inspire attendees to become geniuses – not like Albert Einstein, but more like an everyday kind of genius.  What makes this kind of person? Solving a problem in a way that it hasn’t been solved before.  Yeah, that is genius.  Don’t be boring.  When you have an idea, assume people are going to hate it, laugh at it, or it won’t work.  When you do that, you can then simply focus on the idea.  “Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.”

Closing session was led by Brett Error, Vice President and General Manger, Product and Technology, Omniture Business Unit, where he unveiled the newest release of SiteCatalyst (version 14.7). Some great new features coming our way, with truly printable dashboards, day-of-week reporting, and new graphing options.  The floor was turned over the audience where we got to ask for specific changes in products.  We then voted by SMS for features we wanted most.  Omniture takes these requests very seriously.  So seriously, that they created an ideas exchange site for Omniture users.  Omniture users present ideas, and then get voted on by other Omniture users.  Omniture personnel closely monitor these ideas and update their status as to whether they are in the process of being reviewed, implemented, or completed.

Breakout sessions

The most useful breakout session for me was the Advanced Power Strategies, which was led by Omniture’s Ben Gaines – my favorite go-to guy on Twitter for all things related to Omniture support.  He has single-handedly changed the way Omniture’s customer service is perceived through Twitter.

I walked away from this session with several new things to implement for our clients.  The first, is a new plug-in that is available which shows what percentage of a page is viewed.  While we can already use the ClickMap tool to see hot spots on any given page, we don’t get the insight of what happened to those links that weren’t clicked – were they never seen, or were they seen and just not clicked.  With some fancy footwork, Fuel Interactive will be able to pull this raw data into some classifications that would group percentages into a more workable report.  I don’t want to have to run an analysis that shows every single percentage as its own line item.  Instead we’ll transform the report to show buckets of 5-10% increments.

Another key takeaway was an implementation trick to show engagement activity.  This would allow us to assign a value to every type of engagement activity on a site, like internal search, blog comment, video/photo upload, email signup, etc.

Some new analysis ideas were presented, like calculating what’s the most valuable (or least valuable) content on a site.  In a typical SiteCatalyst implementation, the allocation method is used to assign revenue or conversion values to a page.  If a visitor viewed 4 pages during a visit and made a purchase for $100, each page would be given a revenue value of $20.  This is all fine and good, but it really doesn’t show the true value of each of those pages.  Instead, we’re going to choose to use the “participation” method of attributing these values.  Now, each page will be assigned $100, because each page “participated” in that $100 purchase.

Breakout Session: Money Talks – How to Ensure Your Testing Drives Revenue

The theme here was “make it work, then make it work better.”

Only 1/3 of the market is now actively testing websites.  You have a great advantage being in the minority, making the absolute most of your website, when your competitors sit on the sidelines and hope for things to get better.  For every $80 spent online to acquire traffic, $1 is spent to proactively convert it.  It is recommended that 15% of ad spent go towards optimization.  Small tests can have big wins: in addition to testing the main call to action (CTA) on a page, all elements that are in a near proximity to the CTA should be tested as well, such as the privacy link, security features, etc.

Breakout Session: Improve Your Marketing Funnel: How to Use Analytics to Win the Quest for Conversion

This breakout had some great takeaways on testing.  First was trying to figure out where on a website to start testing. Take a look at a fallout report, and choose the point of largest bail rate.  Then we looked at testing preparation and the best practices for test execution – like never start a test on Fridays – if the test were to have a large negative impact, it would be running all weekend and losing conversions.  Never test multiple things at the same time with the same audience – there’s just too many variables to consider if that were to occur.  You must be aware of outside influences – was there a rate change in the middle of the test that affected conversion rate one way or another?  Once you have results of the test, it’s imperative to segment the data.  Perhaps version C of page had an overall 20% increase in conversion rate, but segmented shows that paid search had a decrease in conversion rate.  So now we figure out a new test to this segment and figure out a new version of this page that works better for that demographic.

Closing

Attending the Summit was really like attending a 3 day rock concert.  OK, we actually did attend a rock concert on Tuesday night with an awesome private concert by The Killers – it was killer (pun intended).  Entertainment was provided each night, with the after-party entertainment provided by Summit attendees – yes karaoke with a live band.  It was quite a site.  As a matter of fact, Josh James and Brett Error performed an outstanding version of the Beastie Boys “Fight for Your Right.”  What a way to end a great event.  Looking forward to next year already.