I’m headed home from eMetrics (in fact, I’m writing this from cruising altitude. Love in-flight wi-fi!) It was my first time at an eMetrics event, and I have to say – it not only met but exceeded my hopes and expectations. (And for the record, I was very excited to go, so my expectations were set high!)

I’m going to write a more in-depth post at a later date, but wanted to share a few thoughts. If these don’t suffice, feel free to check out the Twitter stream on the conference, which I will fully admit I dominated.

However, I wanted to share a few thoughts and favourite quotes of the day.

“I like to build stuff, and blow sh*t up.” (Joe Megibow, Expedia)
“KPIs are your ‘Oh, sh*t!’ metrics.” (Angie Brown) [Apparently it was word of the day …]
Kill unnecessary reports by trying to go “metrics radio silent” and see who notices (Lee Isensee, Unica)

The highlights for me were Joe Megibow, Stephane Hamel and Bob Page (with Adam Greco rounding out the list) and definitely the networking, conversations, and smart people I got to spend three days with. I feel very fortunate to have found such an amazing industry to be a part of, and can’t wait to get more involved via the Analysis Exchange, Web Analytics Association, and hopefully more conference presentations!

I think most conferences end up having a focus. This definitely seems the year of social and the holy grail of multi-channel analytics and complete view of the customer. (Note: we’re now getting demanding. It’s not enough to tie all online. We need traditional and POS and phone data – oh my!)

I also presented about analytics at Kelley Blue Book (the presentation is available here) which was a great first presentation experience. Someone very silly put me in the biiiiig ballroom, but happily, people showed up, and even had questions later!

I’ll share more once I have a chance to compile notes and tweets.