Cebit Australia- Web Analytics, Metrics and Information Management

The Future of the Web – The Semantic Web, Sebastian Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum.
Sebastian starts by giving us the caution that what he is going to talk about is “A POSSIBLE” future with regard to the semantic web. The semantic web is about linking information across the web. The discussion is going to focus on content rich sites. Powehouse’s bread and butter is semi-structured data which they use to improve archived data. Even low quality data has value. The aim is to connect things up. Currently this is all done manually which is a lot of work; in order to hurry things along Sebastian needs to find a way to piece together the data automatically.
Textual analysis tools are used to try automate this function and locate the building blocks of the semantic web. What are the current possibilities of linking all this information? Yahoo pipes can be modified and customised to automate this project somewhat; this is data mining at a pretty big level, mining wiki’s, twitter, blog posts, meta data etc.
The key challenges are:
• Seeing business value beyond your own content
• Building compelling use cases
• Dealing with IP and content rights
• Focusing on the ‘what’ and ‘why’ instead of the ‘how’
• Longer term project but enables many other paths and other futures
Interesting view on the world of data mining and the future it holds. Sebastian’s view of the world is a streamlined and interconnected ‘web’.
Web Analytics: How to Make Sense of the Data by Rod Jacka, Managing Director, Panalysis
Common metrics measured are visitors, bounce rate and conversion rate. You need to ask yourself a few core questions. Do you get enough of the right customers to your site? How effective is your site in converting these customers. How can you improve the numbers? Many of these metrics can’t be seen in isolation but when viewed in context they become valuable. For example bounce rate should be viewed by traffic sources to get some intelligent information. Bounce rate by landing page also yields some intriguing insights. Small changes based on analytical data can make some big changes to the bottom line.
How can you track purchases offline? You need to model your sales process and you need intelligence, not just data. [As we like to say back at BCA HQ it’s what you do with the data that counts! – Kate] You can qualify a visitors value by seeing that they spent at least 30 seconds on your site and viewed 2 product pages.
Big thanks to Rod for some great ways to extract useful and actionable intelligence from data derived from analytics programs. And as Rod points out using that intelligence can benefit the bottom line of any organisation.
Identify, Target and Engage with Your Customers Like Never Before, Mark Allison, Territory Manager for Australasia, WebTrends
Well I got the fright of my life when I was called up to present this session, I even almost got up, luckily the speaker did and I was saved the embarrassment (my name is almost identical to the speakers name when spoken) [Glad you had something prepared… Its pretty hard to find Marc with nothing to say… tee hee hee — Kate]
Mark Allison started off by announcing how the original 4 P’s are changing into the 4 R’s. [I think it has now become compulsory to redefine the 4 Ps at every web and new media conference… Then you can show the required 2 by 2 graph – Kate]

80% of execs believe that they lose consumers by not engaging successfully with clients. The original method was taking people through the process of awareness, interest, desire and action. The new method is reveal, reward, respect and retain.
• Reveal-understand who your clients are
• Reward- reward behaviours with offers and special opportunities
• Respect- highly relevant targeted activities to consumers
• Retain- stimulate interactions with the products through fun and other elements
There needs to be a holistic 360 degree online marketing campaign in order to be successful and the 4 R’s are an innovative method to achieve this.

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.