A couple of days after the event took place, we are astonished by the number of positive reactions. I think that we might already say that this year’s edition went really well. Like always, organizing this event is sometimes a little unpredictable and we often quiver, how it will turn out in the end.
And this tweet kick-started the idea of us being able to attract a lot more international attendees. Prague is a nice city and with circles of friends we made at international conferences like Superweek or other MeasureCamps, it seemed like we could do that.
We knew that we cannot afford to pay any travel or accomodation expenses, but hoped that our offer to provide a special care on top of the usual MeasureCamp experience could be seductive enough to bring in some interesting people.
What happened next was beyond our own expectations and you already know who were the ones that grabbed this opportunity.
The rest is history – the success of every MeasureCamp highly depends on the people that contribute to it. All of you, who did present, but also those who involved in discussions, or those who just helped others with anything, you all deserve appreciation.
We as the organizing team did our job to enable all this. Like analysts that aren’t the ones who directly interact with customers to generate value for the brand, but enable their stakeholders to make better decisions for the companies to thrive.
What’s next
Presentations
So far we only received one presentation link. So, let’s maybe crowdsource this task. Anyone who wishes to share his slides, please do it here:
Hello our friends. MeasureCamp Czechia 2023 is secured. We are very glad to inform you, that next ultimate MeasureCamp Czechia will take place at ČSOB offices in Prague (Výmolova 353, 150 00 Praha 5).
We’re so excited to announce that MeasureCamp Czechia 2020 is going to happen!
It will be in Brno, on Saturday, September 5th.
Due to COVID-19, there has been a lot of uncertainty. And to a certain degree, there is still some. We had a lot of discussions internally, and in the end, we’ve decided to organise a classic “offline” MeasureCamp.
Thanks to your feedback, we know that majority of you prefer meeting your analytical peers in person, rather than online. We prefer it too, and we do hope the pandemic won’t stop us organising it at a given time and place.
Nevertheless, there will be few differences to past MeasureCamps:
Given the “last minute” confirmation there will be more modest catering + gifts. But more fun and knowledge!
We set the limit of max. 200 attendees (with a possibility to a change if our government commands so).
However, one thing hasn’t changed. The event remains free of charge. The only thing you need to do is to “catch” your free ticket.
We plan to do two ticket releases. The first one will be on August 11th at 10:00 (GMT +2) via the Eventbrite platform. Mark your calendars!
Regarding this year’s venue – we are finalising our negotiations. And we’ll announce it very soon. One thing is clear – it’ll be in Brno.
Last, but not least. We couldn’t even think of organising it without the support of our sponsors. Thank you so much!
Current situation is not easy for us. With government restrictions changing every few days we are now still deciding about the best way, how to bring to you valuable and safe event.
Right now, our plan is:
August 5th – we will decide, if MeasureCamp Czechia 2020 will be held as a physical meetup or virtual one
to help us decide, we will send out a survey to the last years attendees (approx. 700 people)
right after the decision, we will inform you about tickets releases, check Tickets page
if we decide for physical event in Brno, virtual event will be prepared as a backup
in the case of virtual event, we will approach our sponsors individually and talk to them about a lower sponsorship or donations of collected money to charity
we are still looking for few more sponsors
to run physical event we need roughly 200.000 CZK (~8.000 EUR)
till this date, we have put together about a half of this amount
Thanks for your support. See you in September, physically or virtually.
We believe active attendees of MeasureCamp love contributing to the greater digital community apart from their analytical peers. It is about the community. We have thus contacted 27 members of PPC, SEO, UX, and product management communities and asked them simply what they perceived as top challenges for data analysts. Even just by stating such challenges, as seen by other roles, we assumed some participants would like to take such as opportunities to shine by solving that or sharing their experience with similar cases. What follows is the compilation of answers from 15 respondents.
Putting data into practice
About half of our respondents, including Petra Větrovská, Adam Fendrych and Ondřej Ilinčev, are dissatisfied with the way how people are working with data in general. Petr Štedrý (2FRESH agency) mentioned the challenge of providing proper access to data to product managers so that they can better decide. And also how to educate to ask more powerful questions.
Respondents working with multiple clients observe some patterns in the way how to utilize data as a tool for investment decisions. Ondřej Ilinčev put it nicely into three steps:
Make it clear what is currently collected. It is almost guaranteed that a client would not have all Google Analytics goals properly setup, something missing in enhanced e-commerce implementation, missing integrations with Optimize or Hotjar, etc.
Present the results of the cooperation in a valuable manner, e.g. using Google Data Studio dashboard.
Adam Fendrych (Rohlík.cz) would welcome tips on trainings, online courses, articles or books on the subject of extracting data insights.
Vojtěch Mikula (Picards) asks data analysts to think about the actual results for a better actionability: when an SEO consultant creates a keyword analysis with 46 tables, the actual result should be a list of insights and recommendations that are specific for various roles. It is important to differentiate between data analysts who take care of data collection, and those who can dig a bit deeper to discover insights that are beneficial for the business.
Educate the client on how to monitor the dashboards frequently and act upon the results. Jan Nachtigal mentioned the problem lies in user-friendliness of customer dashboards: they need to be easy to understand for users who don’t speak the same language as tech-savvy digital marketers.
Data collection challenges
Matěj Slavík (Notino) stressed out the importance of correctly implemented tracking codes. Wrong data inputs imply wrong campaign performance.
Clean data of traffic sources is not always a standard. Pavel Ungr would welcome an overview and tips on an exact way to measure traffic from Google News, Google My Business, and Google Discovery Feed.
Jan Zdarsa (Google, United Arab Emirates) is worried about the impact of measurement via cookies throughout recent changes in the browser ecosystem. ITP/ETP now prevent certain tracking, however cross-device and cross-environment behavior (web x app) measurement has been limited for a long time. The longer purchase decision process, the more complex the situation becomes.
Marketers thus tend to rely on low-funnel activities such as remarketing, as it brings the clearest results. Yet, as Jan points out, for proper marketing processes, one needs to model and predict conversions during the first session based on engagement quality, and also not to rely on cookie-based attribution models as these are similarly bad as the last click model.
To correctly work with these predictions and hypotheses on better attribution models, marketers and analysts should educate themselves in cloud services, data science, statistics, etc. Similarly, Martin Michálek (VzhůruDolů) would appreciate basic measurement trainings and statistics 101.
Marketers then need to follow-up with systematic hypothesis testing and verifications — incrementality testing has already been part of Google, Bing, and Facebook advertising platforms for several years + there are nice technical solutions like Causal Impact. Would you know how to design and run such marketing experiments?
If you read annual reports of Criteo, you might get a feeling of how all current topics like ITP/ETP/GDPR/ePrivacy can impact audiences and targeting capabilities. To not cry over spilled milk, this creates a nice challenge to fully benefit from a good old contextual targeting that PPC managers have had good experience with.
Jakub Kašparů (Lynt) also mentioned a strong case for profit optimization, especially for e-commerce. This challenge includes data integration with analytical tools and advertising networks.
Segmentation and audiences
Petr Štědrý described a challenge for UX designers who would like to integrate behavioral data used for target group definition with digital analytics tools. This type of segmentation should be more useful than traditional socio-demographic attributes that tend not to correlate with the practical results.
Matěj Slavík also mentioned that for audience segmentation (e.g. CRM segments), one needs to think ahead because many advertising platforms do not allow the retrospective definition of audiences for targeting.
Martin Zítek (Heuréka) would like to hear any experience with automated segmentation of audiences combined with triggered notifications across marketing channels.
Multichannel Customer Journey
Various respondents called out for a session on multichannel attribution, especially among online and offline channels.
For a more specific analysis of customer journey, Martin Zítek described a challenge of predicting the next touchpoint that would increase a probability a user would complete a conversion path successfully.
When the journey is not the simplest, some businesses focus more on lead management. Jakub Kašparů mentioned this presented a big challenge for CRM processes but also for digital marketing from proper measurement up to bidding decisions in PPC.
SEO and PPC
Digital marketing topics in PPC and SEO are pretty straightforward:
Martin Zítek described a challenge of PPC and SEO cannibalization analysis with an actionable output of ideas when to advertise and which keywords should be left for organic traffic. Does anyone have experience with an automated solution with search query level data? Martin Šimko sees another cannibalization challenge in the incrementality of keywords with strong organic positions.
Speaking of the collaboration among PPC and SEO, Martin Zítek also mentioned a prediction of sweet spots on a price elasticity curves for PPC bidding, where segmented data of SEO traffic should help identify what would maximize profit or revenues.
Working with keyword-level data presents various challenges:
Identifying and predicting growth areas for organic traffic, as Jaroslav Hlavinka (Seznam.cz) called out.
As a last tip from Martin Zítek, keywords or search queries could be automatically classified to See-Think-Do-Care framework according to their significance and relevance.
Automation and scalability are key topics for any PPC or SEO manager. Filip Podstavec (Marketing Miner) described a challenge of creating meta description values according to the analysis of page content and NLP techniques. Results from a simple NLP model that take as an input a category page, several sub-items, and outputs a 300-chars description can have greater performance than descriptions created either manually or in bulk using rudimentary tools.
Filip also recommended working with NLP on a pre-processing of content for analytical purposes. This way very general pronouns could be substituted by the specific terms, e.g. instead of saying “I wrote a homework and my dog ate it” it would output “I wrote a homework and my dog ate the homework”. Such output can provide more specific analysis using TF-IDF technique.
Webmasters could also welcome a detection of content readability. Filip Podstavec would like to see a headless browser that would be set up to render CSS and JavaScript, and then measure font families and sizes, content visual overlaps and content available on the page in general.
What a load of ideas! Many thanks to the respondents.
Does any of these topics ring the bell to you? We’re be delighted if you can share your experience and knowledge during MeasureCamp on September 7th in Prague.
Every year we rack our brains over all the ways we could further improve the event. To highlight that we honor the principles of unconference we offer you this summary on how you can help us with this task.
The primary goal of this article was to find the spirit of MeasureCamp – not the one we as organizers wish for and imagine in our own heads, but the one that is based on real experiences of the attendees. Because this should enable you to better prepare to the event and it might help you to avoid unnecessary fears that might lock your potential to engage. For that purpose we asked a couple of them to share their own views and asked them for their consent to publish their quotes.
It is about the community
Our event is supposed to be about all of us – the community around digital analytics and related topics. Honoring the possibility to meet and chat with sound names or other familiar faces in person is one of the patterns we found in the answers:
“The best thing about the MeasureCamp is the community and all around it.” – Milan Merglevský
“I enjoy meeting other analysts that I do not have opportunity to meet during the year. “ – Michal Blažek
“I can meet various people, who deal with the same topics as I do.” – Lucie Šperková
It is about sharing and openness
Attendees also talk a lot about feeling safe to present own ideas between like-minded people. It is not just analytics professionals, attendees recruit from all levels of expertise and also from closely related industries. With the forgiving, participative and engaged audience, you can get relevant feedback on your solutions and ideas or advice to issues you have from skilled professionals or simply from someone who just solved a similar issue a while ago.
Sometimes you can also receive the needed last drop of encouragement to break the worries of public speaking.
“What you cannot solve in sessions, you can do during networking.” – Pavel Šabatka
“Informal and friendly atmosphere, quality and often pretty advanced content fueled with super networking.” – Michal Pařízek
“When one presents his topic, he gets pretty uncompromising feedback, because there are people at MeasureCamp who know the subject very well and enjoy discussing it (otherwise they would spend their Saturday elsewhere).” – Lucie Šperková
“The biggest benefit for me personally was, that I dared to give a presentation. That experience moved me forward and motivated me to speak publicly on regular basis since then.” – Milan Merglevský
It is about opportunities
There is a variety of outcomes that you can get out of MeasureCamp.
Probably the biggest one relates to the fact that our industry is in a huge growth for some time now. We can see that, our sponsors see that (this is frequently the reason they invest into our event). Therefore we can guarantee that open-minded individual that finds his passion in data-driven digital marketing, data science, AI or any other related fields, has a great choice of career opportunities to evaluate.
“I tried to present in front of the audience at MeasureCamp in Sydney. Those people immediately started to offer me jobs. That was unbelievable for just a couple of slides and an improvised talk about cloud and BI solutions for digital marketing.” – Lucie Šperková
“Last time I hired a junior analyst just after MatFyz and I would definitely not be angry for a second one next time, because the cooperation goes really well.” – Michal Buzek
It is also about great content, but this time it is not the carefully curated sales-oriented message about the products or about how the presenter’s company is the best out there like you know from the mainstream conferences. Mostly this is real-world case-studies, advice or tips, discussions or educative thinking of the real practitioners among us.
Are you looking forward?
We as organizers do the most we can to remove any obstacles that might block you from expressing your ideas – we will select and prepare the venue with proper technical equipment, we will arrange supply of food, drinks and coffee throughout the whole day and on top of that we always try to attract interesting attendees and motivate them to share their knowledge.
It is then up to you to make the MeasureCamp a great event may it be by giving a presentation, organizing a discussion or therapy session or just actively participate by asking questions, rating the presentations and helping us to share the message that if we unite we will be stronger.
If you have your own comments for previous MeasureCamps, let us know. We will be more than happy to hear your stories and to solve constructive complaints if anything didn’t work as expected. Let us know through comments here or via czechia@measurecamp.org.
