It’s Monday February 16, 2009. After several hours on 2 different planes and a short drive to the hotel, I’m settled in. I went out for dinner and scouted the area for other places after the team arrives tomorrow. My wife will arrive Thursday evening after the conference wraps up. We’ll be staying over and doing some skiing over the weekend.
This is our company’s third time to attend the Omniture Summit. In 2007, Brent Spicer, our Internet Marketing Director, and I attended the conference to evaluate Omniture’s web analytics solution, SiteCatalyst. It was part of our research before making our pitch to the executives. Signing up with Omniture was a significant jump for our company. Moving from a virtually free Google Analytics package to Omniture’s offerings presented a sizeable investment. Our attack plan was 3 pronged.
(1) Do all the research possible…think outside the box. Many times software evaluation consists of online research, demos, industry reports, and perhaps a call to a current customer. We took a slightly different route by attending the 2007 Summit. By attending, we were able to talk with 15+ Omniture customers. This gave us a really solid look at the real life pros and cons of the product. This strategy payed off big for us.
(2) Develop a strategy that would deliver the greatest possible ROI. This meant that some products would get neglected in the effort to cost justify the additional investment in technology. This also meant that we would invest heavily in training. The training at Omniture University ensured that our technology implementation and marketing usage would be as good as possible. We would have no excuses for failure.
(3) Build the case for 1 full time dedicated analytics team member. To get the greatest ROI, we would need at least 1 person focused full time on leveraging analytics.
After 1 year on the Omniture Sitecatalyst product, we saw 579% ROI for the implemenation, software and staffing. A little short of the 800% I wanted, but a success nonetheless.
2009 finds us back in Salt Lake eager to explore new ways we can leverage the tools to reach people online with our message. Because of the work our team has done, we’ve been fortunate to be invited to the MindMeld, an invitation only session. The MindMeld’s purpose is to bring together a limited number of Omniture users to discuss future business needs. It’s exciting to be part of such an effort, and I’m eager to see what new things are dreamed up tomorrow.
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