Recap: our March WAW event

We had an excellent turnout last night (March 14) for our sort-of-first WAW Vancouver last night. 20+ made it out to share drinks, some food and stories of tagging, measurement and other analytics bliss. Was nice to put a face to some of the people I’ve either talked to or have heard of. Quite a diverse group. Some common themes:

• Resourcing continues to be a challenge. Many are wearing multiple hats with their analytics role only “part” of their overall job. Few had analytics-only roles.
• Variety of solutions implemented. Everything from the big guys (HBX, Omniture and ClickTracks) down to home-grown apps.
• The sales model used by analytics vendors (pay per page view) isn’t working for many and they are looking at other options (ClickTracks, Google Analytics, etc.) to keep the costs down. Tons of opportunity for other players and somewhat frightening if I was a major vendor losing some contracts.
• Many had or are taking the UBC courses and continuous learning seems to be on the radar of everyone.

All agreed more of this in the future would be a good idea, but perhaps bi-monthly to better fit with other committments. I’m going to start working on putting together our next event shortly and will post once a date, location and theme is sorted out.

Did you attend? What did you think? Worth doing more? Something you’d like to see in future WAW evenings? Interested in helping out with the planning of a WAW event, let me know.