Scandiweb’s adventures at MeasureCamp

The best web analytics unconference held around the world.

Recently, two Digital Marketing experts from Scandiweb attended the MeasureCamp unconferences in London and Berlin.

What is MeasureCamp and what is an unconference?

MeasureCamp is an unconference about web analytics that gathers analytics enthusiasts from all over the world (UK, France, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Australia etc.). The concept of unconference means that there is no schedule of talks/session in advance. The schedule is created on the day and speakers are fellow attendees. The event is absolutely free and is organized with the support of sponsors and, most importantly, great and enthusiastic volunteers.

It takes place all over the world, however, the epicenter is the London conference, hence it is very difficult to get tickets to that one. Berlin, on the other hand, posed no problems.

Scheduling, talks, tips

As mentioned, the schedule is created on the day of the conference by attendees. This can become problematic, when the schedule begins filling up — great and interesting talks are often taking place simultaneously, so you have to pick and choose.

Furthermore, you have very little information about the presentation you’re attending, excluding the title and speaker. Something that can sound exciting at first can later turn out to have been a mistake and by that time, it’s too late to make it to a different talk you would’ve also found interesting since it’ll be well underway and you will have missed a good deal of it.

Tip #1: Attend the event en masse! If multiple colleagues are present, you can really get the most out of it, by covering as many talks as possible!

Moving on, while there are talks held by industry leaders, there are also a fair bit of beginner-level presentations, covering information that might not be as interesting to those with advanced knowledge. Sometimes, however, the advanced talks can also seem a little intimidating, however:

Tip #2: Pick up “ADVANCED” sessions — even if you do not fully understand in-depth tech details of what is going on, you still can get an understanding of the greater-scale idea and the details can be derived later!

While the talks are very interesting and you can learn a lot about best industry practices, like any regular conference, a crucial benefit is having a congregation of experts in an informal setting. There are plenty of opportunities to seek out interesting people and discuss topics you’re interested in. In London, for example, there was a special after-party hosted by Facebook for just this purpose.

Tip #3: Don’t be passive! Engage, talk and network — the knowledge you’ll gain outside of the presentations can be just as valuable!

The presentations

Scandiweb’s experts attended 8 and 7 talks respectively. Here are the ones they chose and what they were about! If you’re interested in learning more, just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to share further insights!

London

1. Beautiful and useful data viz
This talk was all about data visualization and representation. Creating a good report is as important a task as any, when it comes to digital marketing, so insights about different methods of doing so, as well as various faux pas, was very informative.

Turns out there are a lot of pie-chart haters, except the French, since: “We love camembert too much to hate on the pie charts!”

2. Website rebuild/learn how to win on SEO
This talk consisted of a real-life example of how they improved BookingLive SEO.

3. The Perfect Dashboard Rocks
Another talk regarding creating optimal reports. This one focused a lot on understanding the stakeholders and tailoring your results, so they can absorb them in the easiest way possible and make informed business and policy decisions! Check out the 2–20–200 approach and don’t forget that your reports tell a story, so make it a good one!

4. Making Better Decisions Faster
The speaker shared his framework on how he makes and evaluates his optimization decisions. Maximizing and improving the results by using a strict methodology can help move rapidly and make improvements without excessive and unneeded detours.

5. From analytics to CRO — a data-driven story
Another case study regarding optimization, the speaker shared their real-life experience in making data-driven decisions when optimizing. It’s not only about analytics! The weather was included as an interesting factor regarding optimization — in their case, it affects the purchasing habits of customers, so it should be considered when making decisions!

6. Optimal team structure for digital analytics
This was an interesting overarching discussion about how to build the perfect digital marketing team — what skills are required for what tasks in CRO & Analytics and what set of skills should be found in every team.

7. Practical form/checkout optimisation
The speaker shared some interesting points he checks when optimizing the checkout. Starting with basics and diving deep into advanced practical solutions, it was interesting to see a lot of Scandiweb’s practices echoed by him!

8. Being Predictable
In this talk, we explored the topic of predicting user behavior and how it affects our decisions as analysts.

Berlin

1. x-Session Analytics in BigQuery (GA) — discussion
This session was all about how Big Data could be used in analytics. Touching on topics on how to compose individual hits into sessions, time between sessions, matching attribution channel to the conversion and categorisation of the content, a lot of interesting things were learned.

2. Your Data Protection Survival Training
This talk was about the to-dos of GDPR compliance. Three things to keep in mind are 1. List of cookies; 2. Inform user; 3. Pseudonymity. If you want to know more — just drop us a line.

3. Agile Digital Analytics
Another talk that validated Scandiweb’s current system, this one went in-depth on the reasons why analytics teams should switch to an Agile workflow. This ended up being one of the less useful talks since we do that already!

4. GDPR/E-privacy quiz
This was partially a discussion and partially an experience sharing session. One woman, with over 1000 GDPR setups done shared some interesting insights and different implementation strategies. Various interesting ways of getting users to OPT-IN were discussed.

5. How bot traffic costs you money & screws up your data
This was an insightful talk, where a lot was learned about bots. There are various intelligence levels — those who don’t render JS, those who do and those who both render JS and can interact with UI elements. There are also “good” bots, such as Google’s website crawlers and “bad” bots, such as those screening eBay auctions to make last minute bids. The effects these can have on your websites are quite considerable.

6. SEO BI — Crawl Automatization
This talk discussed the automatisation of website crawling and things you can do with this data. Automated crawls can be performed with ScreamingFrog and the data can be stored on internal servers and visualized — you can see SEO changes over time.

7. Working from abroad
The day was concluded with a talk less useful from a professional perspective, but interesting nevertheless. The speaker shared her experience from working abroad, along with a multitude of tips for how she managed to stay on top of her schedule and how to keep in sync with both her team and clients.

Conclusion

Two incredible days and countless valuable insights. Both of Scandiweb’s participants were very excited to go and returned with their expectations met, encouraging other colleagues to attend as well. Interacting with other Digital Marketing and Analytics experts, discussing various hot topics helped them bring home ideas to both play around, as well as implement!

See you soon, MeasureCamp!

Curious to learn more? Want to know how Scandiweb can apply our newfound insights to grow your business? Comment below or drop us a line at [email protected]! Some pictures have been taken from #measurecamplondon. If you see your picture and would like credit, or for it to be removed — use the email above!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like