A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend and speak at eMetrics in Sydney, Australia. This was the first conference I had attended or spoke at outside of the US, and a very unique opportunity to see how the digital analytics industry is thriving elsewhere. One thing that stood out to me: the analytics industry in Australia is a tight knit community with a ton of engagement via IAPA which is a similar organization to the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) in the US. It was great to meet and talk with everyone at this event and I walked away very impressed with the level of talent and enthusiasm that I saw. The second thing that stood out to me: Twitter is still an up and coming medium for
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Yesterday I had the unfortunate experience of watching the Asiana Airlines flight 214 Boeing 777 crash land at SFO (San Francisco International Airport). While viewing the crash landing, I had my phone out. My first instinct, before all else, was to snap a photo. Then, as I yelled out “Holy shit! A plane just crashed” I began tweeting about the crash. The first tweet and photo of the crash went out to the world before anyone had even finished comprehending what had just happened, within 20-30 seconds of the plane hitting ground. Omg a plane just crashed at SFO on landing as I’m boarding my plane pic.twitter.com/hsVEcVZ2VS — Krista Seiden (@kristaseiden) July 6, 2013 The incredible thing about social media is how instant it is. Within seconds twitter was exploding with
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Last month I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the 2013 eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in SF. What is always a good conference seemed even better this time around. The sessions I attended were high quality (as always), but the biggest (personal) take away was how close this industry is and how talented a group of people I fairly regularly (via the conference cirucit and a few other random get togethers) get the pleasure of hanging out with. I couldn’t imagine another industry with cooler more talented people. What makes it even better is that we all have the opportunity (and a lot of us do!) to interact on a daily basis via twitter and other social channels which helps foster the awesome relationships you make at these
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The other week I had the privilege of attending the DAA 2013 Awards for Excellence along with 180 of some of the brightest minds in the analytics industry. The talent in the room was unparalleled! A quick recap of the nominees, finalists, and winners: Digital Analytics Rising Star (individual) Nominees (** indicates finalist): Eduardo Cereto Carvalho** (Google) Chauncy Cay Ford (Dell) Rachael Gerson (SEER Interactive) George Lee (AOL) Abbe Lefkowitz (MaassMedia) Mathieu Llorens (AT Internet) Tim Patten (Localytics) Mike Pedicino (Catherine Plus Sizes) Krista Seiden (Google) Himanshu Sharma (SEO Takeaways) Elizabeth Smalls (Abercrombie & Fitch)** Pradeep SV (Cognizant) Jared Vestal** (BrightTag) Tiffany Zimmermann** (MillerCoors) Randy Zwitch** (Keystone Solutions) And the winner is: Liz Smalls (@SmallsMeasures) Most Influential Agency/Vendor (group) Nominees (** indicates
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Working as a practitioner in-house at a technology company, one of my jobs is to teach my team members how to fish with Google Analytics. What should they be looking for in GA? Where do they start? What is meaningful? Are the campaigns being measured? Are the microsites tagged? These are the types of questions I get everyday, and very likely, you do too. In this guest post, I detail how I teach my internal practitioners to use the following 3 features: 1. Event Tracking 2. Advanced Segments 3. Shortcuts Visit the official Google Analytics Blog to see the full post!
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I received an email the other week congratulating me for moving out of my Noogler (new Googler) faze, which I guess is defined as your first 6 months at Google. It’s hard to believe I’ve already been here for 6 months. So what have I learned? A lot! 1). I’m surrounded by a lot of really smart people which constantly pushes me to try harder and work smarter It’s not that I haven’t worked with a lot of smart people before. I definitely have. But it’s really a whole new level which is both exciting and scary. I’m constantly aware that I’m not the smartest (or second, or third) in the room. It’s a challenge every day to keep up (and I’m loving the challenge). 2). Likely a consequence (more
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Two weeks ago in Salt Lake City I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend and speak at unSummitSLC (I spoke about mobile & cross-channel analytics). unSummit is a half-day, intimate gathering of digital marketers from all over the country and local university students that takes place the day before Adobe Summit each year (this was it’s 3rd year). The idea is to share content/presos about relevant topics in the industry without the pitchiness of many of the presentations at larger conferences. It’s also a great learning platform for students who are interested in analytics (I wish something like this had been around when I was in college!). This was my first unSummit, and I walked away very impressed and inspired by the day. Some of the biggest
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This past week I had the unique opportunity to attend Adobe Summit as a part of the industry but not a part of the Adobe community (currently). In a prior life I worked as a web analytics manager for Adobe and attended Summit as an employee and active user of the Omniture suite, so attending this time with an outside-looking-in viewpoint was quite an experience. Many things have changed since my time at Adobe, and many things remain constant. For me, one of the biggest changes is the push towards the Marketing Cloud (and an active effort to kill the Omniture brand). In many ways, I see the benefits of this type of front-end collaborative interface, but I do have my doubts and concerns. Benefits: Drag & drop flashy interfaces
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It’s the age old question – what’s the best skill set for a web (or digital) analyst? Many will tell you that you’ve got to be technical, meaning you at least need to know html, javascript and SQL (at minimum). Others will tell you that you don’t need to be technical at all, you just need to understand the toolsets and be able to talk to the business. Finally, the most common answer I hear is somewhere in between – you need to be technical enough, and business savvy enough. But what does that really mean? Am I technical enough if I can talk the talk but can’t actually write my own code? Am I biz savvy enough if I can make pretty graphs and powerpoints? I myself fall into
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