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The History of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

By Jim Sterne
(Updated February 2010)

Jim Sterne Since 1993, I've been traveling the world (United 1K, 2 Million Mile Flier) and writing books (eight if you count second and third editions) and articles about how wonderful the Internet is. I spent years trying to explain how this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Somebody finally asked me, "How much better than sliced bread is it?" and I knew I needed to come up with a answer.

I had been presenting at Internet World all over the planet and was always intrigued by Matt Cutler's presentations. He was the founder of NetGenesis (purchased by SPSS) and always sparked some new thought or two whenever he did his PowerPoint thing.

After several years of seeing each other present, Matt and I finally had the chance to sit down over dinner at an Internet World in Sydney. We were determined to figure out some way to do business together - and we hit on the road show, This was the classic, half-day seminar where you trot out the 'leading expert', give a product demo and then jump on a plane to the next city to do it again.

On the road and on the path to going public, Matt asked me to co-author a white paper called "E-Metrics - Business Metrics For The New Economy". That led to a book, which led to this conference and that led to the Web Analytics Association.

I could see the potential and wanted to bring together the best and the brightest. I wanted to see the big sparks fly when wildly intelligent people tackled an issue as new and exciting as the Internet was back in 1993.

The first eMetrics Summit in 2002 was very exciting. Everybody was thrilled to discover that they were not the only ones who understood the language and the possibilities and the difficulties. Back at the office, our enthusiasm was met with patronizing but blank smiles and our concerns were met with non-comprehension. Here at eMetrics was a whole room full of people who shared the same hopes and fears and battled the same dragons. We had finally found kindred spirits.

In 2003, it was just as exciting, and just a bit naive. We were all hoping that all of the answers to all of our problems would tumble out of these wonderful new web analytics tools. The focus was "Page Tags vs. Log Files". The discussion was heated. New technologies were emerging in real time and the vendors paid very close attention. It would take another year to realize we needed all the data we could get our hands on - that both logs and tags are necessary.

At the eMetrics Summit in 2004, the focus was on case studies. "We did A/B split measurements on landing pages and found a 32% increase in subscriptions." "We tied our email marketing campaigns to our funnel diagrams and were able to double the conversion effectiveness by 75%!" Real results from proven, successful implementations.

The 2004 conference was the birth place of the Web Analytics Association. Bryan Eisenberg, Andrew Edwards and I instigated the founding with the help of Greg Drew, Rand Schulman, Andrea Hadley and Seth Romanow. 2004 was also the year that the eMetrics Summit went to London where it was 2002 and 2003 all over again.

In 2005, people were asking about the technology and the case studies, but they also started showing an interest in how a web analytics organization works within a larger company. What's the chain of command? Who should report to whom? How does the business side of the company learn about the value of web analytics? How do you take this technology that we're getting comfortable with and use it to make business decisions? Several presenters in London proved that the UK was no longer behind - there were some companies that clearly 'got it'. As William Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."

The theme for 2005 was "My Managers Don't Understand Me". Now that we had proof that these tools and techniques could open a window into the hearts and minds of the marketplace, we needed to convince the powers that be to fund the needed tools and talent to make the most of the opportunity.

Santa Barbara, London, Munich and Washington D.C. hosted eMetrics Summits in 2006. That year, the focus was on integration. Multi-channel marketing and multi-channel data collection. How do I incorporate my web data with my direct sale information and my call center? How do I fold web analytics in with the rest of my business intelligence? And a handful of companies talked about how the insights coming out of their web analytics tools were powerful enough to impact decision the corporation made about offline marketing as well - a harbinger of things to come.

The 2006 theme was "How We Measure Web Behavior to Guide Our Offline Business" and the eMetrics Summit itself took a sharp turn. It was no longer just the seminal event for web analytics insiders. It had become a major destination for marketers and technologists of all stripes who wanted to improve the results of their online efforts and optimize their return on investment.

In 2007 the Emetrics Summit shifted gears and became the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. It was celebrated in San Francisco, London, Düsseldorf, Stockholm and Washington D.C. The talk was no longer about clickthroughs and pageviews. Of course, everybody was still interested in tracking web visitor behavior, but the discussion included all the ways you can measure your online success. Customer opinion and satisfaction, email marketing, search marketing, non-transactional metrics, Web 2.0 measurement, behavioral targeting and more. It was really about marketing optimization and how online marketing has opened peoples’ eyes. Direct marketers had been doing statistical analysis all along, but they never got the recognition they deserved - until now.

We started the whole thing off in 2008 with a Web Analytics Association Training Day followed by three days of conference with four or five tracks each and over 75 speakers. It was a much bigger, broader experience and companies were signing up four and five people each to cover all of the subject matter.

We fired up another eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto and expanded the content even further with a track called Integrated Marketing Optimization. Why? Because the web was no longer off in a corner by itself. It was becoming the hub of marketing. A corporate website was where advertsing and promotions directed prospective customers. It was where people would offer up feedback as well as research and/or make purchases.

Then came 2009 and everybody wanted to know where the ROI was.

That was the year of the Great Economic Crisis. That meant the bean counters were coming out from behind their spreadsheets, tipping up their green eye shades and casting their gaze over the marketing department. They were asking tough questions like, "You want to spend how much on Social Media? And just what is a Social Medium?"

In 2009, measurement stopped being interesting, novel or cool competitive edge stuff. That year, it was all about survival.

Marketers had spent ten years learning to communicate with technologists in order to make their message sing, dance and interact. They'd spent three years learning how to actually converse with actual customers. 2009 was the year they had to speak fluent Marketing ROI in order to keep their jobs.

This year, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is getting practical and tactical because we no longer have the luxury of Thinking Deep Thoughts - we have to execute. We have to show them the ROI or they won't invest again. This is the year of the example, the recipe, the playbook.

The new decade is less threatening and more hopeful. We learned how to cut back and get laser-focused, now we can get back to the business of looking to the future. We don't have to look far because right, smack in front of us is Social Media.

Yes, 2010 is the year of figuring out how to measure social media. Welcome to the brave new world.

@Jim Sterne, February 2010

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