Just back from the Emetrics Summit in Santa Barbara. Here is a quick run down of what I learned:
1) Santa Barabara is a beautiful and expensive place to be (my first time)
2) The issues experiences by those who use data to gain insight into website visitors, marketing campaigns and their business are fairly consistent across industries. List to follow in a different post.
3) The more you put into your system for measuring and understanding, the more you get out.
4) Web analytics is not cheap, but the main cost is in the people doing the looking and analyzing, not the systems themselves.
5) Without someone who is interested and capable and has time to do the work, you are wasting your money.
6) The trend is to build more channel management tools into a web analytics platform. The Omniture Search tool is one example. However, the tools will never be as good as companies that specialize in building solutions for that channel - ie; Atlas Search or Omniture Search will never be as good SearchRev, MatchCraft of iFrontier.
7) Jim Sterne runs a great event.