Kathy Hofer: Hi Brandon - of all breakout sessions @ Engage, I gained from yours the most. I plan to implement scorecards ASAP. I'd like to share your presentation with Management. Could you please send it to me at: kkhofer@comerica.com Thank you! Kathy

Germain Krueger: The session you gave at Engage was VERY interesting and informative. I went into it not knowing a thing about scorecards and came out feeling like we have totally been missing the boat on the reporting possibilities w/WebTrends and MS Exce. Thank you very much!

Ken Gruber: Brandon, could you post your presentation or send it to me at ken_gruber@bio-rad.com so that I can share it with my managers? They are interested in creating scorecards similar to what you showed in your presentation. Thanks, Ken

Derek Fine: Marc, thanks for your comment! I was waiting until my presentation was here before I replied. All of the presentations are up now. It was great meeting you and I enjoyed our offline discussions during the event. Don't forget to check out the Webtrends Outsider blog at http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/ for more cool stuff.

Marc Thompson: Thanks Derek for a fantastic and informative session. I for one am glad I staid until the last session Thursday. By far the best session of the week in my opinion! Chris and Eric added tremendous value to the discussion/presentation. Please let us know when it will be available for download. I would very much appreciate being able to recap this session for a few of my co-workers that use WebTrends regularly, but couldn't make it to Engage. Job well done!

April Moore: Hey, Mary. It was great seeing you again, too. Stay in touch.

Debra Paynter: Hi Mary, great write up. I value all the conversations we had over those few days. Thanks for following through and writing up your thoughts. I look forward to meeting up with you again in 2010 and us sharing with each other where we have grown to.

April Moore: Great session today, everyone. Thanks so much for participating. I have some notes that I would like to share with the group based on our session, but, unfortunately, with people coming in and out, I didn't get to hand out a sign-in sheet. So, if you'd like to get a copy of my notes, please email me at april.moore@webtrends.com and I will set you up. Thanks again!

April Moore: Well, it's almost here! I hope you'll all come to our workshop ready to share what you are doing and what you'd like to do. Some of the new things you will be hearing about at Engage, in regards to the direction that WebTrends is moving, also hold promise for measuring "shopping card impaired" websites. It should be a great discussion!

Chris Grant: Hi Derek, count me in, in principle, but the sessions themselves are so compelling that I'm reluctant to miss any that are scheduled for the same time slot as the PP stuff. Talk to you then.

Terri Boyle: Yes, I'll arriving at 3:30. I imagine I'd be at the resort by 4:00/4:30ish. I'd be glad to join in if you need some help. Just let me know what you want/need.

Jinny Potter: Michele - I'll definitely be tweeting and posting photos to flickr during the conference for my colleagues who can't make the conference. My twitter stream is connected to my Facebook account, where the majority of my university and college webmasters reside. I arrive on Monday around 2:30 pm. I'd love to help anyway I can. I'm following you, so please feel free to @reply or dm me. Look forward to meeting you!

Manoj Jasra: We'll have some coverage at Web Analytics World (blog/Twitter).

Bill Bruno: I'm looking forward to seeing everyone and presenting this topic. It's critical to integrate your data, and I'll be covering the following Integrations: ExactTarget OpinionLab Foresee Results Visible Measures Optimost

April Moore: I have been doing a bit of research for the workshop and I'd like to get some feedback on something I've been thinking about. I'd say that brand-oriented, brochure-ware type sites would definitely fall into the parameters of our discussion, and also I'd say that not-for-profit websites, public sector (hospitals and universities, for example) and corporate Intranets might as well. Can you think of other categories of sites that might fall into this broad bucket of non-commerce, i.e., sans shopping cart? The intent is to focus the discussion on sites that fall outside of the traditional e-commerce model - but to me that could include almost everyone except for e-tail sites! I don't want our discussion to get too broad. Thoughts? Comments? How finely do we want to focus our discussions?

Louis Soran: It would be great if you could include ad-supported sites in the scope of this discussion. There is often no clear-cut action, event and/or conversion to gauge success, and we are always looking for new, and better ways of measuring the performance of our site. We have so many great reports in WebTrends, and are able to easily identify traffic trends, patterns and fads, but it is very difficult to show the relationship to $$ from advertising. Page Views is an important KPI, is a solid gauge of performance and can be correlated to ad impressions, but this alone is not enough. Not all page views are created equal, and depending on the ad(s) that the ad server delivers, the value of a page view varies. For example, a drop in page views to a specific section shown in a WebTrends report quite often sets off alarms internally. Folks from Editorial, Marketing, Product, etc. end up spending time investigating, tweaking and "fixing" things, but without clear insight into how much (if at all) the drop impacts revenue. If the section in question is only running house or remnant ads, is it really worth the effort of Marketing and/or Editorial spending time and money to promote or "fix" it, probably not. With expectations rising and teams shrinking, it has become imperative that everything we do can be tied directly to revenue.

April Moore: Thanks for mentioning ad sites, Louis. I have been thinking about those, too. Are you able to add segmentation to the reporting mix so that you can track qualified visits based on specific persona-based criteria? That might be an interesting discussion for our workshop. Certainly, segmentation becomes very critical when you are trying to understand motivation without a clear-cut tie-in to revenue. Keep the ideas coming, folks!

Jason Widup: Hi Everyone! We're only a few weeks away from Engage - I hope you're all as excited as I am. Here's a bit of trivia about me: I used to travel to Vegas once or twice per month in my early 20's to be a guest DJ at an off-the-strip mega-club called The Drink (anyone remember? - its name ownership and name has changed). And this trip to Vegas for me will be the longest I've gone without visiting Vegas since I turned 21 - it's been probably about 5 years. I'd love to hear more comments about this session - even if they are just personal about you and why you might attend this session. We're well underway with content and will be slightly changing this abstract based on our new direction in the next few days. Come back to the site often and stay tuned because things are always changing. Some of you may have seen me speak before. I'm the kind of guy who has 0 nerves until the mic is attached to my collar. I try to tell some jokes (anyone at the Energy Summit in Dallas - the joke about new wooden-soled shoes?) I like to have fun in my sessions and I have a TON of experience in the field with more clients than I can count using all my digits. It will take me a few slides to roll into my groove. I like to have a very open and free forum because I like to get into conversations about some of the topics instead of just rambling off what I know and have done. I 100% don't mind being challenged because I feel that I have enough experience and am smart enough to provide at least some nugget on any digital marketing or analytics question asked of me. We're going to dive relatively deeply into each of the focus areas (of which there are now 6!) and I'm going to provide an overview of each area as well as talk about some example tools and projects that you can use within each area. Thanks for reading this and please feel free to comment. Finally, if this works, I'll leave you with a picture of my smallest of two (he's 3.5) playing RockBand from inside a plastic storage bin. He can pass all of the initial songs on Easy - show me another 3.5 year old that can do that :-)

Andy Lieder: I can't wait to attend this one, and I encourage others to sign up! The panel speakers are exceptionally bright and are THE thought leaders in web analytics. Well done, WebTrends.

Michele Warther: Vincent - There will be a few other customers joining from across the pond, as well as WebTrends team members. We'll get you together w/Maarten Sambre whose coming in from our offices in Belgium.

Michele Warther: Not a rumor - they'll be speaking on Wednesday morning. More details end of this week.

Chris Grant: It would be great to get a quick outline of what this solution, and competitive solutions, can and cannot affect. Most of us have managed these things manually, even on a small scale, and we know the decision points - bid size, match type, content network, daily maximum spend, monthly ceilings are the ones I can think of for financials, and various combinations of keywords, ad title, ad copy, geography and time of day limits, and choice of landing page for the nonfinancials. And, I know that these things affect, from the searcher's viewpoint, my ad's position among the paid ads, and likelihood of seeing my ad at all for every 100 search term searches. I am pretty sure that size of bid affects position, and daily spend ceilings affect the percent of related searches that display the ads ... But I can never get a good story from the automated solutions about what they actually do affect, and this would be a great place to start. The service we use, for example, apparently only changes bids ... which doesn't do us much good when our daily cap results in only one out of ten searches showing our ads. Or so I understand. They are no help at all with the "exposure rate" as I call it. Nor can I get good info on exposure rates. Anything you can offer about these critical underlying dynamics would be great. Fancy interfaces are nice, but the more you can turn me into an expert who knows what can be affected and why I want to, the better I'll be able to sell it to our clients.

Chris Grant: Oooh. I definitely want to know about any and all creative data collection methods that will get offsite, conversation, mention data (controlled by others, not placed by me) into WebTrends. Links from these other sources that actually do generate traffic? Yes. Simple mentions? No. Not getting that into WebTrends at ALL. Now you've got my imagination going. There really might be alternatives to Twitter Search, YouTube search, blog search ... other than manually or an aggregating service like Radian6? I'll be there, if I can get to Engage at all, that is!

Chris Grant: It is wonderful that you are doing blog posts in advance of your session.

Gareth Hebbron: Part 2 of the series has now been published: http://blog.webtrends.com/2009/03/11/tracking-visitors-in-a-rich-media-world-part-ii-rss/ Focusing in this post on RSS tracking with Server Side tagging or an alternative tracking technology Atomic Labs. Product; Pion.

Gareth Hebbron: The first of several blog posts related to this Work Group has been published on the official WebTrends blog: http://blog.webtrends.com/2009/03/09/tracking-visitors-in-a-rich-media-world-part-i-tracking/

Mike Clark: great! Thanks. I look forward to meeting you.

Jennifer Wilson: Hi Mike. While this particular customer is B2C, there are many parallels that can be drawn with B2B. In fact, our own company's use of these solutions is testament that it is applicable to B2B.

Mike Clark: Would this be a good seesion for a b2b? Or is this more geared to b2c?

Chris Grant: Hi PJ, The first thing that comes to mind are "what are the topics that, throughout the years, have gotten a great response from your audiences?" Other than that, it would be great if you could have some material was specifically and explicitly aimed at newbies, some for advanced users, some for maniacs. Then the newbies would know they didn't need to be intimidated by the maniac material, etc. Meanwhile, I will try to think of a set of Troubles that I need help troubleshooting, and I'll come back here.

Jason Widup: Hey everyone! If you're reading this it means I did a good enough job on the session title to get you interested enough to click! I'm excited about these new workshops we're doing this year. It will give us an opportunity to have a truly interactive discussion in a small-group setting. If you have any questions about this session please feel free to post it here - I'll be notified by email and will respond promptly. Thanks and I look forward to seeing you at Engage!

Jason Widup: Hi Chris - thanks for the question! My discussion won't be focused on any specific WebTrends product - in fact, the content will be relevant across vendors, products, and industries. And I promise I'm not just saying that to try and sway more people into attending! Our new Digital Marketing Optimization (DMO) team was recently started by myself and a long time colleague and friend of mine, Brandon Ralls (also a presenter). All of the consultative engagements we do with our clients are rooted in supporting their online business objectives and follow one or more of the five focus areas that I'll be talking about. As an analytics user you know how critical high-quality data is to the success of the recommendations you make based on your analysis of that data. The framework I'll present contains best practices within an analytics program that will result in the quality of data required to be used as support for important business decisions. Hope to see you there!

Chris Grant: Jason - question - is this going to be relevant to Analytics users? Or is it focused on Warehouse and VI?

Jacques Warren: Hi John, I think your approach is good, since not that many companies use WH/VI, and there's defintely a need to see what can be taken out of Analytics to be integrated with other DB. COunt me in!

John Defoe: Chris, It will definitely be relevant to both! However, since nearly all companies at the conference leverage Analytics I took that into strong consideration. I built the presentation around what folks could take home and leverage immediately after the show as well as highlight some items they can strive for as they mature thieir own internal analytics practices. l have a real customer as a "Guest Speaker" and his piece is around leveraging analytics to increase engagement on your site. Something straight forward that everyone can leverage and the results they received from an increase in clickthroughs and ad revenue were quite impressive. The results they received make it a no brainer for other companies to leverage as well. Hope this helps and can't wait to see you at the conference!

Chris Grant: John - Question - Is this going to be relevant to Analytics users, or will it be about Warehouse and VI?

Jeff Jobe: I wasn't planning on talking about site auditing tools so I'll be happy to discuss it here. I've had limited experience using one site audit tool and I must say that it was a challenge! To use one of those tools you need to have a very good working knowledge of your site along with a plan for auditing. It sounds like you are doing on a small scale what the big applications do. One example of a pitfall with a crawler: calendars. When an crawler examines a site that has any kind of calendar it has the potential to get caught visiting every day from now until it runs out of memory.

Chris Grant: After three-plus years of getting great troubleshooting information from you over the phone, I am equally excited. Are you going to touch on ways to check whether the tag is on the proper pages? I know that sorta comes before troubleshooting the actual tag, but it's really important and baffling to many of us. What we do is get a list of all the URLs on the site (from the CMS, or by setting a crawler), then we feed the list of URLs to a script that hits the site and records the SDC info that gets sent to the SDC server. Then we check through that list. There must be better ways ...

Jeff Jobe: I'm so excited to be hosting a session at Engage! After three-plus years of troubleshooting customer sites I finally get a chance to show people what I've learned.