The walk to the ExCeL center this morning was great as it was the first sunny day since I’ve arrived in London. The sky was clear and the view was great heading up there.
Day 2 was filled some amazing conversations. I spent a good portion of the morning talking with Till Buttner. Till is based in Bonn, Germany and we connected through the magic that is the analytics community. Our conversation moved from one technical topic to another, from data layers to TMS implementation methodologies, but the one thing we kept coming back to was the analytics community. It’s a unique community of like-minded people that love what they do and have passion for their work. We both had similar experiences when we first started working with analytics; there was a community that supported the newbies. We had Twitter and blog posts to leverage when we were exploring ideas or trying to resolve issues. We spent time talking about how we both want to help the community grow and support the new crop of rookies coming in. Till is a contributor over at the Analytics Playbook and I’ve been using the 33 Sticks blog to do just that. We’ve both been using these ways to get the information that we’ve acquired over the years from our heads and make it available to others. Thanks for the great conversation Till. We’ll be talking more soon.
Next, I attended the “Too Hot for Main Stage: Peek Inside the Future of Adobe Analytics” breakout session with Bret Gundersen, Jan Exner, and John Bates. This was an extremely interactive breakout session. Taking the format of an election, they showed 5 potentially new features that they’ve started working on and the goal was to come down 1 that would be fully developed and added to the Adobe Marketing Cloud. While there were some great potentially new features, it came down to Auto Segmentation and Virtual Analyst. Auto Segmentation would give recommendations on visitor segments based on the data that Adobe Analytics collects from the site. This feature could bring to light visitor segments an analyst hasn’t thought of yet. Virtual Analyst would monitor KPIs and send alerts based on changes in trends. It would also be able to surface project recommendations for the alert. After some debate amongst the attendees, a final vote was taken and the ultimate winner was Virtual Analyst. While I had another preferred choice, I’m excited to see what this feature could bring when it ultimately is released.
Following the session, I was able to finally catch up with Jan in person. We have been talking back and forth via Twitter, so it was nice to meet face to face.
The rest of my day was spent having conversations. I talked with our friends at Dixons Carphone. The breakout sessions are very informative, but my favorite part of Summit is always the conversations that I have throughout and this one definitely did not disappoint.
I had a great time in London and am excited for my next visit here.
[author] Jim Driscoll [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://i2.wp.com/33sticks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/9239556033_a7e5c89228c15928b3f0_192.jpg?w=192[/author_image] [author_info]Jim is a consultant on the Solutions Engineering team at 33 Sticks who brings 15 years of solution design and technology implementation experience, with 9 years focused on web analytics and digital marketing technologies. He is a fitness enthusiast and avid sports fan. He also thinks he can play golf.[/author_info] [/author]