The State of the Analytics Nation

Doug Hall (ConversionWorks, London - UK)

As an industry your progress this year will be brutally assessed so it's time for your annual forelook. This is an evaluation of what our industry does well, what we need to start doing, start doing better and what we need to stop doing.

Stories from ten years in the trenches of Google Analytics

Caleb Whitmore (Analytics Pros, Seattle - USA)

t's been nearly ten years since Google acquired Urchin Software and turned it into Google Analytics, unleashing the era of democratized data. Take a walk down memory lane from those early days through present and learn from the triumphs and trials of tens of thousands of hours working with hundreds of companies and billions of data points. Tips, tricks, techniques and more. The tool has evolved but the objective remains the same: to understand and optimize marketing, user experience and business value.

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce Reports - A Practical Guide

Yehoshua Coren (Analytics Ninja, Jerusalem - Israel)

This hands on session will walk you through the details of the Enhanced Ecommerce data model, provide guidance for how to implement the tracking, and walk users through how to use the new reports to gain actionable insights to improve ecommerce performance.

Decision Making at Scale: Blending AB Testing, Predictive Analytics, and Behavioral Targeting

Matt Gershoff (Conductrics, New York - USA)

In all the excitement around Big Data and Analytics, even savvy users of business intelligence can get a bit confused about how and when to use A/B Testing, Predictive Analytics, and Personalization to optimize. But optimizing isn’t about choosing which tool to use: Optimizing is about making decisions. The digital environment gives us an opportunity to make these marketing decisions at scale. In this session we’ll discuss how to bring these tools together to make better decisions, we’ll also touch on how machine learning can help us automate the process to free up analytics teams to focus on the higher value problems.

Google Analytics bag O' tricks

Simo Ahava (NetBooster, Helsinki - Finland)

Are you using some event tracking to learn more about your visitors? Good. How about using Enhanced Ecommerce and the Page Visibility API to analyze content engagement? No? Simo will walk you through these advanced use cases, and provide you with a number of tools and resources you can use to think outside the box when using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Inspiration is guaranteed.

Conversion Rate is Dead

Ravi Pathak (Tatvic, Ahmedabad - India)

Conversion rate is significantly over hyped metric that so many ecommerce experts just focus because there is so much news, media, articles, tools, experts around it. If you think the current situation as one of the wave in revenue optimization, there are important waves starting in e- commerce optimization that easily get unnoticed. Ravi will discuss Roshoman effect in current ecommerce industry and show us why he believes conversion rate is overhyped metric. Further Ravi will also explain what are the waves of ecommerce optimization & how they currently shape the future opportunities.

PANEL: THE ECOSYSTEM BEHIND OUR INDUSTRY

Ari Strauch (Five Blocks - Israel)

Samia Abara (AT Internet - Paris)

Caleb Whitmore (Analytics Pros, Seattle - USA)

Jeff Sauer (Knowledge Land - San Francisco, USA)

BLACKHAT ANALYTICS 3: "DO BE EVIL"

Phil Pearce (Precision SEM, London - UK)

Testing the boundaries of what can be tracked & what gets noticed.

PANEL: GTM CHANGED EVERYTHING

Yehoshua Coren (AnalyticsNinja - Israel)

Simo Ahava (Production Director, NetBooster Finland - Finland)

Charles Farina (Analytics Pros, Seattle - USA)

Phil Pearce (Precision SEM - UK)

ILLUSIONS, LIES AND MYTHS OF AB TESTING

Craig Sullivan (Optimal Visit, London)

There are many illusory ways of running tests, where you can call a winner and make the wrong business decision or waste valuable time. There are the lies you can tell yourself that will prevent the team from designing good tests or learning from them. And lastly, there are the Myths of Testing - things that you might think are true but turn out from real life experience to be a sleight of hand. Expect to learn some cold hard truths about testing.

USER-CENTRED ANALYTICS: OPTIMISING THE EXPERIENCE

Tim Leighton-Boyce (CxFocus, UK)

We’ve come a long way from counting pageviews and cookies. We can now instrument our sites (or our apps and whatever else) in ever more complex ways, and if we push the limits of the technology we can even try to track people across different devices. But the technological challenges are difficult and the end results still fit into the original model of measurements based around where people came from, what material they viewed and whether they ‘converted’. We focus on technology when we’re trying to understand human behaviour. This presentation is about pulling together all the clues we can get about the experience of the people who make up the ‘traffic’ on our sites. If we can understand what they want to do, why they want to do it and how this is relevant to a journey towards our final conversion, then we can help optimise the process. This is not about people how people get to our sites, this is about why they came and what they do.

LATEST ON MOBILE

Gary Illyes (Google, Zurich - Switzerland)

Mobile is still growing very fast and some webmasters are ignoring this, but at Google we are focusing more and more on mobile because we think it's one of the most important topics at the moment. With this presentation we introduced at SMX East new concepts to mobile optimization, such as mobile-readiness and host load, concepts that make mobile optimization techniques more transparent. We're going to disambiguate these terms and cover a few more to help you create for your users a great mobile experience!

BOULDER-DASH-BOARDS

Steen Rasmussen (IIH Nordic, Copenhagen - Denmark)

Analytics dashboards are the new craze with fancy interactive visuals and an inferno of data. But they often lack the most fundamental, crucial and simple element. They are not actionable. Enjoy a walkthrough some very delightful and beautifully worthless dashboards as well as some ugly efficient wonders of insights - and learn how to tell the difference.

OPTIMIZE YOUR MARKETING MIX WITH ATTRIBUTION MODELS

Jacob Kildebogaard Webjuice, Copenhagen - Denmark)

How do you use attribution models to evaluate your traffic sources and your marketing strategy? In this session Jacob will look into a few cases where different models give different results. There will also be focus on AdWords and how to evaluate the performance based on attribution models.

CROSS-DEVICE MEASUREMENT: NOT SO EASY

Charles Farina (Analytics Pros, Seattle, USA)

Learn from both big wins and big mistakes of the past year in working on data models to provide user centric and cross- device reports. Maintaining an implementation is hard enough on web or app alone, but the reward of tracking all your users experience is well-worth the significant effort it takes. Cross-Device done right is so much more than just User IDs.

JUST OBSERVING DATA IS LIKE WASTING YOUR TIME IN FRONT OF A TV

Valentin Radu (Marketizator, Romania)

Imagine you've seen the hottest woman in the entire universe. And you've made fantastic efforts and convinced her to give you her phone number. But, how can you score if you don't bother calling her? That's the trap when you try to improve the performance of a website by only observing data, patterns, anomalies, etc. In this session I'll show some real case studies about some websites that scored by mixing qualitative & quantitative data, persuasion and real- time personalization.

GOOGLE SEARCH'S FIVE FOCUSES FOR 2015

Gary Illyes (Google, Zurich)

Predicting product's demand based on user's different action & restructure the merchandise & pricing based on it.Measure different action which occurs between users & product (i.e. add to cart,prod view, etc) & build a mapping to identify high value product for large group of user.

HOW CAN A DATALAYER HELP MY SEO

Phil Pearce (Precision SEM, UK)

Advent of hybrid JS-LD structured markup: Terminator theme. +++ Transition to the training day on Friday.