One of our outcomes of going to the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco in May was to find out the major differences between the web analytics market in the US and Europe.
Actually the idea started after a post by Eric Peterson, Europe and the WAA, in which he started the discussion to split the WAA into a USWAA and a EUWAA, as, in Eric’s opinion, both markets should be educated and targeted differently because of the differences in budget (Europe is 2 to 4 years behind) and level of expertise.
We already commented on the idea to split the WAA on this blog, but we wanted to digg a bit further and hear the vision of several experts which have been working on both continents.
So before, during and after the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco, we have been (and still are) talking to practioners, consultant and evangelists about the possible differences in both markets and what they think will be the next hot topic/tool/service.
The next few weeks, we will be posting these conversations and our findings on this blog. We invite you to take part in the discussion, and are eager to hear your ideas.
So here we go with the first interview and who else than Jim Sterne to start our series with!
Jim Sterne, Founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (www.emetrics.org) and Chairman of Web Analytics Association (www.webanalyticsassociation.org) has been in online marketing strategy consulting since 1993. Jim was one of the pioneers of using the internet as a marketing medium, is the author of several books and articles, and a true evangelist of web analytics. Even after 15 years in this business, Jim Sterne remains wildly enthusiastic about the matter.
His main goal for organising the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits is to bring a lot of people together who are equally passionate about marketing optimization as this makes a great conversation and helps the market to move forward.
As WAA Chairman and having organized numerous eMetrics Summits in the US and Europe, Jim Sterne has a perfect view on the geographical markets tendencies and the adoption of web analytics as such.
According to Jim , the European market is not behind anymore and two types of companies can be indentified:
- large and small companies at the low end of adoption - are doing “some things” with their web analytics tool, they are looking at reports but are not really engaging or using this data.
- large and small companies at the high end of adoption -are very much more engaged, and is using the web analytics data for some very advanced marketing strategies and business insights.
The US is bigger, and therefore there are more advanced companies in the US. But companies in the US also started using web analytics earlier. US companies have always been very interested in experimentation and pioneering.
They find a new technology, jump in and test it. They want to have even a little competitive edge by being there a little bit earlier.
And in Europe, companies will wait and see, and if a new technology works they’ll adopt it.“
Because of these differences in adoption rates, together with the cultural and linguistic differences within the European market, a hot lead discussion is currently held in the blogosphere whether to split the WAA is a USWAA and a EUWAA, or not.
As Chairman of the WAA, Jim Sterne is open for all suggestions and acknowledges that there are plenty of initiatives to take. He is convinced that the European market place should act more autonomous and be more in control of what they are doing. The big question, however, is to figure out how to do this. At this stage there is too little information:
” What is absolutely clear is that we have to figure out how to engage local members to be more involved in Association association activities. Does that mean, within the current structure, changing the structure or having separate organisations? These are all large organisational change questions that create many more questions. My goal for the very short term is to figure out: how do we go about answering those questions? “
As hot topic in the current and future web analytics market, Jim Sterne is very enthusiastic about behavioural analysis and targeting.
“ Behavioural targeting has been an idea that has been around since a long time, but the tools are finally starting to be more sophisticated and the capabilities are starting to live up to the promise. There are vendors who offer solutions that can watch contextually which subject matter you rare interested in, how quickly you move, how frequently you come back, etc and therefore show you a different ad, show you a different article, send you a different email and many more options. This kind of automated marketing is starting to take hold. “
Read all about Dennis R. Mortensen’s opinion and vision on this blog next week.
[...] get bored by the story they have to tell. And I took the opportunity to interview both of them in our serie about the web analytics market in Europe and the States. So come back [...]
[...] we already did a video-interview with Jim Sterne, and a written-interview with Dennis R. Mortensen, we decided to go for a podcast-interview this [...]