eMetrics Canada History
The first eMetrics Summit was launched in Santa Barbara, California in 2002 by Jim Sterne. Back then everyone was thrilled to discover that they were not the only ones who understood the language, the possibilities and the difficulties associated with understanding website activity. The conference continued as an annual event selling out weeks in advance.
In 2004 the conference was the birth place of the Web Analytics Association. Bryan Eisenberg, Andrew Edwards and Jim Sterne instigated the founding with the help of Greg Drew, Rand Schulman, Andrea Hadley and Seth Romanow. 2004 was also the year that the eMetrics Summit launched in London, England.
Santa Barbara, London, Munich and Washington D.C. were the host cities of eMetrics Summit in 2006 and with this came a new partnership with Matthew Finlay of Rising Media. The 2006 theme was "How We Measure Web Behavior to Guide Our Offline Business" and the eMetrics Summit itself took a sharp turn. It was no longer just the event for web analytics insiders. It had become a major destination for marketers and technologists of all stripes who wanted to improve the results of their online efforts and optimize their return on investment.
In 2007, the talk was no longer about clickthroughs and pageviews, the discussion included all the ways you can measure your online success. Customer opinion and satisfaction, email marketing, search marketing, non-transactional metrics, Web 2.o measurement, behavioral targeting. It’s really about marketing optimization and how online marketing has opened peoples’ eyes. Direct marketers had been doing statistical analysis all along, but they never got the recognition they deserved - until now.
The subject matter became too big and too broad to be contained in a one-track event. In 2006 in Washington D.C., the conference began with a Web Analytics Association Training Day followed by three days of conference with four tracks each. There were close to 75 speakers. It was a much bigger, broader experience and where companies started signing up four and five people each to cover the subject matter. Not only did the conference expand in content, the number of host cities expanded to include San Francisco, Düsseldorf and Stockholm.
The industry is growing and growing up. The idea of web analytics is no longer as scary or as confusing as it was, the growth rate for the industry is heating up and the morphing into marketing optimization is taking hold.
In 2008 Emetrics Summit expands again with the launch of Emetrics Canada and eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit Toronto, welcoming Andrea Hadley as Conference Director and partner.