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Turning Numbers into Understanding

Webtrends Engage 2009 brought together hundreds of marketers, analytics professionals and industry experts at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas to explore ways to more efficiently and effectively gain understanding from their analytics and other data.

A palpable buzz pervaded the conference, fueled by the ongoing exchange of ideas and contacts in the sessions, small group discussions and the constant stream of postings about Engage on Twitter and various blogs.

The conference’s format encouraged interaction and learning. Attendees helped shape the agenda, which included 18 workshops where they could discuss real-world analytics and business challenges with industry experts and other attendees. And rather than ignore the economic realities of the day, presenters and attendees discussed ways to use analytics and marketing optimization to overcome them. As one appreciative attendee put it in a posting, “Best Webtrends conference ever.” We couldn’t agree more.

Highlights

• The keynote presentation by Ian Ayres, the author of “Super Crunchers,” who described how large businesses and organizations are gaining predictive insight from the enormous data sets they are amassing. Recap / Video
• Roundtable discussion with Ayres and Murray Gaylord, New York Times Vice President of Marketing. Recap / Video
• Roundtable discussion with Dan Langer and Luke Peterson, top data crunchers from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Recap / Video
• Analytics consultants Jim Novo and Jacques Warren, Anil Batra of Ascentium, John Lovett of Forrester and Bill Gassman of Gartner talk about the socialization of data. Recap / Video
• The launch of Webtrends Social Measurement, a partnership and integration with social media monitoring, analysis and engagement service Radian6. News Release / Video
• Networking Events and around Engage. Pictures

Themes

• Numbers. Long strings of seemingly random numbers flew across the presentation screens at Engage to make a point: The massive volumes of data at our disposal today have little value unless someone can find the insight within those numbers. “Numbers have remained digits in analytics… meaningless numbers on a page,” Webtrends President and CEO Alex Yoder said during his opening remarks. “We are interested in helping to bring numbers to life.” Video
• Openness. Webtrends unveiled its new corporate philosophy, Open Exchange, at Engage. Openness guides Webtrends support for standards-based data exchange -including new, no-cost data integration APIs announced at Engage – as well as how the company interacts with customers and builds best-of-breed solutions with its partners. Video
• Social Media. It was hard to escape the influence of social media — from the people who followed the Engage Twitter account to the launch of Webtrends Social Measurement. Video

To view all of the information shared at the Las Vegas event visit our media gallery.