Omniture Summit 2010

One usually finds that client events are small, intimate gatherings. This is most certainly not the case if you are a client of Omniture, which at this point has solidified its position as the top web analytics firm out there. At this year's Omniture Summit, 2,000 or so people came out to the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City to do pretty much everything but sleep.

Obviously, the big news since last year's Summit was Omniture's acquisition by Adobe. This changes the landscape of web analytics significantly. The merger of content creation, along with content measurement, performance and optimization, in theory makes the process of making web analytics results more actionable, which has been something of a holy grail for web analytics professionals for quite some time. At the event, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced one of the first integration points between Adobe and Omniture products, the integration between Adobe CS5 and Omniture's Test & Target product. A good start, but we still have quite a ways to go. I'm still rooting hard for seeing web analytics go, well, beyond the web. There are a lot of file types that come from various Adobe products which live on websites in a very real way, from SWF files created in Adobe Flash, to PDF files created in Adobe Acrobat, to all the graphics files that come from Adobe Photoshop.

The Stage at Omniture Summit 2010 (courtesy Omniture's Flickr Photostream)

As usual, social media ruled the day. The keynote included an announcement between Omniture and Facebook to integrate Facebook with Omniture's SearchCenter product, to make it easier to advertise and optimize Facebook ads. Dan Rose, VP of Business Development from Facebook, was there to announce this partnership. Josh James, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Omniture Business Unit, also had his usual keynote.

The event took Social Media one step further than usual. Obviously, there was a Twitter hashtag for the event, #omtrsummit, and each session had its own hashtags and blogs. For example, if you were in the session "Transforming From Web Analytics to Online Marketing", there was both a dedicated blog for the session, as well as a dedicated hashtag, #omtrsummit101. When you can only choose 6 sessions out of 55 to attend (really, can we cut it down a little?), and you have many keynotes, and other parties to attend, managing your schedule can be a nightmare. Omniture solved this problem in a unique way by creating the Omniture Summit Companion, an Adobe AIR app that brought in not only a full list of sessions, but allowed you to set your own agenda, but check out event maps, integrate Twitter feeds, and access various news and updates about the event. Another social media type thing was the use of everyone of a Poken. What's a Poken? Well, it's part USB flash drive, part contact management system. Basically, if you touch one Poken to another and it flashes green, you have successfully exchanged business cards. While a neat gadget, I am admittedly still skeptical. If you have a Poken and the other person doesn't, you're stuck. Also, I'm still worried about authorizing all these things to leverage Twitter's OAuth, Facebook Connect, or LinkedIn OAuth, simply because you never know what is going to end up spamming your social graph. So far, Poken has behaved, but I came back with far more business cards than I did Pokens, or whatever they prefer to call it.

As far as the keynotes go, there was a pretty serious one-two punch of industry leaders. John Battelle, founder of Wired Magazine, and now CEO of Federated Media ended Wednesday night with a great presentation, and Seth Godin (left), famous author and "Agent of Change" started off Thursday morning. Between them, however, was a private party Wednesday night featuring a little bit of entertainment. Generally, these events employ local bands or some house bands to entertain people for the evening, but not the folks at Omniture, who got The Killers to show up and play a concert for the attendees. The Killers? Really? It almost made web analytics people feel, dare I say, important. Of course, for even more fun, all Friday was spent getting a thousand or so Omniture customers up to Snowbird for skiing and snowboarding.

So, what are the takeaways? A lot of major points came out of the event.

First of all, integration of data is key. Marketers have gone past the point of not having enough data, to having too much. Even worse, it is often siloed. Omniture Genesis integrates various partner data from external marketing vendors into Omniture. Omniture SearchCenter brings in data from the search engines, Google AdWords, Microsoft (Bing) adCenter, and now Facebook, into the same place. Hopefully, this should simplify things, both from the data collection standpoint, and also, making these numbers make sense to one another. The net net (hopefully) will be an increased value from web analytics tools.

Second, people just won't stop talking about Social Media. It is the hot topic buzzword of the decade, as every company wants to be on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn these days. That's all well and good, but do many companies have business cases for it yet? Obviously, even if they do have the business case, getting actionable analytics has proven to be a daunting challenge. You can get site traffic from links back to your site, but measuring on-site activity has proven to be a challenge. Even more of an issue is measuring engagement in a meaningful way. Facebook's page statistics are very helpful, and integrating them into Omniture will help, but it is only a start. We're going to need similar data from Twitter and the like.

So, not only are we struggling to integrate the data we do have and do something concrete and actionable with it, but we still do not have enough data in areas such as Social Media and measuring deep engagement. The challenge continues, but with the turnout Omniture had at this year's Summit, there is definitely going to be a lot of attention being paid to these critical problems of Web Analytics in the coming year.