Web Analytics Congress in the Netherlands

I'm currently at the web analytics conference here in the Netherlands, where Neil Mason of Applied Insights is doing the keynote speech, saying he doesn't actually like web analytics, but rather calls it online marketing optimization and I feel strangely at home...

His main point is that you should work from the organizational goals to online goals to online KPI's. That's a lesson for web analytics, but it goes for online marketing too I guess, basically for just about anything...

He talks about why it's important to set good KPI's, and that you should actually do that before selecting a package. He tells a story about wanting to change a button from red to green to test something, and the client laughing about that, saying that it would take 6 months (!!) to implement that. Such a well known reaction, sigh...

Most people who visit your website only visit once, generally only look at one page, most likely stay for one minute, and transact with you once... If you divide your visitors into different segments, the segments that are most valuable too are usually small.

He's telling us that the main goal of web analytics is to get back to knowing your customer as well as the "old style" marketplace people did.