Omniture Summit 09- Day 1.5

Hello from snowy Salt Lake City. As part of my attendance at Omniture Summit, I’ll be bringing you some daily updates on what I say, ate and learned in my week-long adventure. You can also see my “up-to-the-minute” comments (or rants) in Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/rmanzanet).

For this blog entry, I used “1.5” because I’ve been in Salt Lake City since Monday afternoon. With every story there’s a beginning and this one started with a snow storm, San Diego style (lot of rain), which delayed my flight to Phoenix by an hour and I forced me to do a 50 yard dash to the gate, barely catching the connecting flight and was able to sit in the tail of the plane. After checking in, I got lost in the trying to find my room and fought with the door trying to get it open. Although one can almost predict the rest of a stay by the beginning of a trip, everything has been good…so far. I attended a reception at the Grand America Hotel, where I got my credentials and needed materials for the week. I was able to meet with some old friends from Omniture, as well as made some connections with some analytics enthusiast. We discussed about how the field of analytics had changed in the last couple of years, as well as our expectations for the week. There was a band made up of Omniture executives, and although I knew of them, never heard them live. I must say that they where quite entertaining, even hitting some high notes. I departed the event around 10:30pm, only because it was over and the place was being cleaned.

This morning, I woke up expecting snow on the grown, or at least in the air. I figured, if I spent the money on a nice coat, I wanted to break it in. I watched the news with the expectation of snow, but the weatherman said that it was going to be warm. So I got ready for the day, walked out to building and what do you know, snow was falling like crazy. In a way I was relieved because I got to use my coat, but this told me two things: that weather people need to do their homework better and that when snow falls, it gets cold…really cold. After getting the snow off me, I got into the bus and off to the official beginning of Omniture Summit 09.

I was fortunate enough to take the Landing Page Optimization Certification by MarketingExperiments. This course is originally given in a day and a half but because of Summit, it was compressed to a one day event. I went in to the class expecting to hear things that I already knew, but what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin and his team showed us was incredible. They approach landing page optimization from a quasi-scientific model, explaining that the probability of conversion is just a way of remembering those factors that affect a conversion of a site and how they relate to each other. They discussed how the placement of content, the design of a site, as well as your calls to action can positively or negatively affect your conversions. Another interesting item that they discussed was the idea of how a connection is done from a search engine to the landing page and how that flow can be broken if the information does not match on both the search engine and the landing page. At the end of the session, we had to take a test that had 71 questions. Although, it was an open book test, and some of the questions where discussed, it was still nerve-wrecking to finish it in an hour, but I did and think I passed it too. We’ll see, so stay tuned.

The evening was spent in the official reception, where I met with Kim and found that John was still on his way (at the time of this entry, he’s in his room finishing the presentation after drinking a pot of coffee). The theme for the reception was Mardi Gras, with beads, a Cajun-style band and a food court with themed food, like fried catfish. I introduced to Kim some of my ex-coworkers from Omniture, and networked with some of the attendees. One thing that never fails is at the degree that some people will go for a something free. For this year, in order to qualify for the drawing of a 50 inch plasma TV, you had to meet with every vendor there, listen to their pitch and get a stamp. It almost look like a carousel of people trying to get their passport tagged by the vendor. Wonder if we could dump that in a prop?

Alright, it’s almost 1am, so before I fall asleep I’ll finish for the day. Tomorrow (or today) will be another full day of sessions…and the Maroon 5 concert. So with that, stay safe and adios.