SXSW from a Web Analyst Perspective

With the recent announcement from the SXSW Interactive Director to raise prices by 27% for early registration, I thought I would branch out a little bit from my usual posts and talk about what I thought about SXSW Interactive from a web analyst perspective. The reason that the Interactive Director gave for the price increase was the new price is competitive with other pure tech conferences. While SXSW also includes a music and film portions, the majority of the attendance is for the interactive portion and the price increases for music and film were not quite a steep. My personal thought for the price increase is to control the number of people that will attend the conference. There were rumors that SXSW was going to limit registration and while they did not limit registration, by raising the rates it has the same affect and if the same number of people attend as last year then SXSW will just make money. Now the question is, with the price increase or without the price increase, is it worth going to SXSW Interactive.

Year in Review

It was a year ago this week that I was traveling for the holidays and I made the decision to start this blog while sitting in a hotel room. I knew there were quite a few blogs about web analytics already with various opinions on different topics. When I decided to start this blog I wanted to focus on one thing, sharing my experience in web analytics both good and bad. The experiences that I have shared have been about recent topics and some as far back to when I first started my career in web analytics. I have had a great time writing this blog this past year sharing my experiences. I hope that I was to give you more information about a decision or give you an idea about some things to try. I look forward for the coming year and sharing more experiences with you. Though in the past year, I have focused on certain tools, in the coming year I am planning on sharing experiences about various tools and analysis. In the great time that I have had sharing my experiences, you may have come to my blog and not find the answer you were looking for. I compiled a list of the top search terms that brought users to my blog. I am going to try to give more information and/or links for each of the different search terms.

Sizing It Up: Measuring and Optimizing Rich Internet Applications

When I started thinking about what I was going to write for my next blog post, I had a couple of topics in mind trying to keep with my original plan for my blog of sharing my experiences in web analytics. Then the news broke that Adobe has agreed to purchase Omniture. Whether this acquasition is going to be good or bad, only time will tell. There has already been enough written on this topic, so I am going to focus this post on another topic. When the news broke of the acquisition, an idea for a post came to me. About a year ago or so, I co-presented a webinar with Omniture for an Adobe online seminar. Little did I know what would transpire a year later. As you can see from the title of the post, the webinar was about measuring and optimizing Rich Internet Applications. I have been very lucky in the last couple of years to have the opportunity to measure and optimize RIA’s and to work for the company that worked with Omniture to develop their flash tracking (ActionSource). Though I am not a developer and have never actually added the ActionSource tracking I work very closely with our flash developers to make sure the tracking that I would like is added to the RIA’s. Though I have tracked many different applications, most of the RIA’s that I going to cover in this post involve flash video, but I think this will give you a good idea of some of the tracking capabilities.