Awards for Excellence 2014: Nominees

Congratulations to the 2014 Awards for Excellence Nominees

Digital Analytics Rising Star (Individual)

  • Intan Andini, Digital Analyst, XM Gravity Open to view Nominee Details

    I'm An experienced Website and Social Media Analyst in Digital marketing company and now transforming into Strategic Planner with a proven track record of success within top-tier clients such as XL Axiata, ICI Paints , Indofood, Unilever , Johnson & Johnson , and Nestle   Has led significant Digital programs that have delivered tangible benefits to clients.  Achievements include: Taking a leading role setting Digital assets goal for all clients. Taking a leading role boosting XL Axiata 's website Alexa ranking from 213 to 114.

  • Paul Bailo, CEO, Phone Interview Pro Open to view Nominee Details

    Helped over 500,000+ job seekers leverage their phone interview communication skills by leveraging the power of data analytics to create a digital analytical evaluation computer system.

    All of the analysis has been compiled is an award winning book – The Essential Phone Interview Handbook and featured in CNN, Fox News, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal (Radio), USA Today, News & World Report, Business Insider and has lectured to Ivy League Universities.
    This is ground breaking research that has leveraged data analytics to make a true impact in the lives of 500,000 people.

    MBA, MSW, Ph.D. (candidate) is the founder and CEO of Phone Interview Pro – a service for job seekers who want to perfect their telephone job interviewing skills. Mr. Bailo recognized that while resume, interview preparation, and target company research assistance are commonly offered by outplacement and career counseling organizations, the importance of the telephone interview is often overlooked. In response to this, Phone Interview Pro has created a 250+ point phone evaluation not seen in the career services industry...until now! This is not only a new company, but also a whole new industry; it's exciting for us, of course, but the real excitement generated by Phone Interview Pro will come from those who hone their skills using the service.

  • Grant Deppe, Senior Project Manager, Web Measurement, Fidelity Open to view Nominee Details

    Over the past year, Grant has been an active participant in a program to create a digital measurement center of excellence at Fidelity. This effort included leading the creation of consistent data collection, ownership and activation practices across different teams and processes. Grant leveraged cutting edge technology, including internal data / tools and commercial solutions, tied together with a world-class tag management platform to optimize site measurement while leveraging strong data governance, including appropriate information privacy practices. Grant is providing leadership for the technical vision and roadmap for highly advanced and sophisticated onsite/offsite/offline data integrations in 2014 and beyond. Grant is also highly active in the local analytics community, providing leadership in analytics roundtables and always willing to share his expertise. Grant combines a deep understanding of technology with a can-do attitude to accomplish great things in digital measurement.

  • Allaedin Ezzedin, Manager, Digital Analytics, E-Nor Open to view Nominee Details

    Allaedin Ezzedin is my Digital Analytics superhero.  He's an industry veteran with more than 7 years of experience, currently managing a global team of analytics implementation specialists for the Digital Analytics powerhouse, E-Nor Inc.  Allaedin has led the successful deployment of analytics solutions for organizations ranging from Fortune 25 to data-driven start-ups.  He is always the first to jump onto a data challenge and look at it from every angle, examining every crevice, twisting and turning it making sure the perspective is legitimate, then squeezing, juicing, and extracting the most insight out of the data as possible.  From his passion for the latest tools; his innovative ideas in code, strategies; his definitions of efficient best-practices and implementation; communication of data into clear tangible reports; and translation of metrics into insights and goals for executives and marketers - any interaction with Allaedin will have you seeing his visions and dreams of bridging the gap between business requirements and technical capabilities.  Allaedin tirelessly aids the marketing community get the most out of their Digital Analytics experience, actively participating in industry conferences, beta testing new features and functionality for the latest tools, and communicating customer feedback for future enhancements.  His blog posts and theories are widely read and known amongst avid Analytics ninjas.  As if that's not enough, he is the founder of CampaignAlyzer.com, a tool I use frequently.  CampaignAlyzer is a web-based application that acts as a central repository platform where organizations can store their marketing campaign values in one database. Marketing agencies and digital marketers across organizations now have the ability to collaborate in tagging various online and offline campaigns, and ensure consistency in their marketing campaign tagging.  I hope you will consider him for the rising star, only cause a "digital analytics rising sun" isn't an available option. 

    Certifications:

    • Certified Web Analyst (Digital Analytics Association)
    • Google Analytics Individual Qualification (Google)

    DAA Interview with Jim Sterne:

    Videos:

    Social Profiles: 

    Personal Site:   www.allaedinezzedin.com

    Recommendations:
    “Allaedin has been a driving force behind the implementation of Google Analytics on SonyEntertainmentNetwork.com. He has a deep understanding of web analytics and has written educational articles on best practices and new features. He has the unique ability to explain complex systems to unfamiliar audiences. Furthermore, Allaedin is always available and willing to help. Allaedin has exceeded my expectations on project deliverables and I look forward to continuing to work with him.”
    Amanda Thompson | Online Marketing Manager | Sony 

    “Allaedin is super bright, personable and consistently delivers amazing results. His knowledge of the Analytics space, especially Google Analytics, is awesome and enables him to delight his customers.”
    Avinash Kaushik | Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist | Google  

    “Allaedin implemented Urchin for us. He is very reliable and punctual. He is very nice to work with. He is also flexible, since he was able to accommodate last min changes.”
    Andre Barata | Project Manager | Agilent Tehcnologies 

    “Allaedin is super sharp. He really knows his Google Analytics, and I highly recommend him as an analytics consultant, due to his incredibly thorough knowledge of analytics.”
    Donovan Rittenbach | Web Manager | California Academy of Sciences 

    “I`d like to Thank Allaedin for a great, interesting and useful seminar about Campaign tagging in Google Analytics and using Campaignalyzer. Our audience learned a lot about how simple and fast working with campaigns can potentially be, and I hope that someday this app will have Russian interface so our residents could use it freely.”
    Iraida Yudintseva | SEM Complex 

    “Whilst we have never physically met I find Allaedin to be extremely knowledgeable about Google Analytics. Better still, he is great at sharing his knowledge and ideas to benefit the analytics community. I am an avid follower of his work and reader of his fantastic blog posts.” Nikki Rae | Web Conversion Specialist | Fresh Egg

  • Mark Johnson, Senior Manager, Digital Analytics, Avios Group Limited Open to view Nominee Details

    Have worked with Mark in setting up a new Digital Analytics team at Avios, and I've seen his dedication in promoting digital analytics within a business which has traditionally been fully directed over the usage of offline behavioural data. He recruited, trained and set up the team on his own, which now plays an imperative role in shaping the Digital Sales, Marketing and Travel Strategy. 

    I would like to nominate Mark for this award for his work on increasing the understanding of customer behaviour with regards to the “look-to-book” metric. This relates to the travel industry and is a measure of the number of booking made by a particular customer relative to the number of searches a customer made on that particular route. This metric is important as it provides a measure of which route searches (that resulted in a booking) are popular and therefore indicates the route may be under-priced, or conversely, not popular, and therefore overpriced. A small fluctuations in the metric can result in huge changes in profit or loss, therefore calculation of this metric using a robust methodology is crucial. Mark used a novel methodology using Adobe Insight, modifying the data architecture to allow tracking of the customer through the whole user journey to allow the accurate calculations of this metric. The resulting analysis resulted in some actionable Insight and increased conversions on under booked routes. 

    Mark works for Avios (formerly known as Airmiles (UK) and currently part of IAG, that includes both BA and Iberia) – Avios have been a customer of SCL for some time, but their internal analytics deployment, while technically good, was never fully adopted or appreciated by the wider business.  Since starting at Avios he has led (and subsequently built a team) around delivering actionable insight to the wider business: 

    • Extended the already member-centric nature of the analytics to present (in a meaningful way, and only when appropriate) 100’s of extra dimensions and metrics – allowing for deeper insight about specific user segments. 
    • Actively embraced new digital analytics opportunities, bringing App Tracking into Avios, through Localytics, a system not used before, identified the benefits of this to the company and how to integrate this with existing digital analytics.

    Actively looking to push the limits of what is possible:

    • Implementing connection of data between Online Research tool (ForeSee) and Web Analytics Tool (NetInsight)
    • Implementing connection of data between Facebook App and Web Analytics Tool - meaning the company for the first time had strong insight on members use of Facebook.  Despite the time consumed in the long term and day-to-day challenges involved with an initially unloved and under-resourced platform/team Mark has helped the UK analytics community by setting-up group on Linked in specifically for UK Web and Digital Analysts to share thoughts, ideas best practice, actively inviting and engaging digital analysts and key contacts from agencies and web analytics providers. (https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=7413413)

    Rapidly growing knowledge and understanding of digital analytics
    Within Avios Mark has sought out new insight opportunities through App tracking, Social Media tracking, Mobile and Tablet digital insight and digital data across all 3 Avios websites in the UK, Spain and South Africa. The highest level of progression has been incorporating new and existing forms of digital insight into other sources of Customer Data. One particularly project on Availability substantially progressed the understanding within Avios of Customer behaviour relating to flight searches. This has been held as an innovative and progressive piece of insight within Avios, driven by Insight from web behaviour that mark has been instrumental in achieving. As a result there have been new agreements created between the Airlines and Avios that outlines what the right amount of supply is needed and on which routes and in which cabins that give the right level of customer satisfaction for customers.

  • Kashif Khurshid, Sr Strategist, Web Analytics, Waste Management Open to view Nominee Details
    Created a web analytics community in Houston from the ground up and continuing to grow with new sponsors each month with a formal structure. http://webanalyticsinhouston.blogspot.com/
  • Rob Kingston, Optimisation & Analytics Specialist, Optimisation Beacon Open to view Nominee Details

    Rob has presented at Melbourne SEO Meetups to encourage people to become analytics evanglists and creates some great tests and articles on his blog http://www.optimisationbeacon.com/ and also sharing and engaging on social media.

  • Arun Kumar, Director Analytics, Razorfish Open to view Nominee Details

    I feel that I have been really at the forefront of driving innovation for clients through my work at Razorfish. Working with one of our largest clients I have driven a data driven approach to measuring impact of brand media-hitherto a very 'touchy feely' area. Using a scorecard approach, I have converted media discussions from being based on gut to being based on a scientific approach. I have also led the creation of innovative analytical approaches to measuring media impact (for example, measuring the incremental impact of brand media without the use of a PSA, using cookie/ad server data to identify behavioral impact of media). I have also been actively involved in launching key projects for our clients such as cross device tracking and multi touch attribution. I feel I deserve this award because I have driven strong impact on my clients through a laser sharp focus on their needs and this has earned me the trust of senior clients. I am seen by them as a trusted advisor and thought leader in the digital space.

  • Valerie Lambert, Digital Analytics Manager, American Medical Association Open to view Nominee Details

    Two and a half years ago I was hired as the Web Analytics Manager for the publishing side of the American Medical Association. The work I did for our group lead the corporate side of the AMA to decide last year that it too needed someone to take control of their digital analytics as well. As I worked with them to craft the job description and determine a salary range, I became quite concerned. I knew the market and they were asking for a significant amount of experience and skills with a salary range that didn't measure up. Not surprisingly they struggled and I was sure they'd need to give one way or another. When they told me they had hired someone from within their market research department and she had very little web analytics experience I was very worried. Looking back now, I shouldn't have been as the individual they hired is a not just a rising star, but a rock star. Valerie dove into the role head first; while the expectations placed on her were enormous, and some of the business leaders she served were at times unfair and even condescending, Valerie did not waiver. She consumed every digital analytics resource she could find, and began attending every conference she could, even paying her own way when her budget was trimmed. She asked questions relentlessly but with such genuine passion and desire that you couldn't help but want to share everything you could and root for her success. As notes from her superior, Nick Abruzzo, and the two consultants she worked closest with, Adam McArdell and Tamika Braxton, will attest, she has overcome a truckload of obstacles to build a fantastic foundation and culture of digital analytics within the AMA. Early on I was happy to play the role of teacher and mentor, but in this short time she has unquestionably become a trusted partner who I often look to for input and perspective on my own projects. She inspires me to continue to learn and grow and I'm just hoping I can keep up with her in the future! The impact of what she has built (the largest custom google analytics implementation ever worked on by our consulting group Stratigent) is just now beginning to be felt and the executives are ecstatic. Meetings where she had been allocated 10 minutes to quickly review "metrics" are turning into an hour of discussion around the new insights she's brought. She now manages the tagging and analytics for over 57 web properties, many with diverse goals and objectives. This list is reduced from the original 72 due to her work with Portfolio Review team which used her analysis to help guide where the AMA should focus their efforts and resources, and where they should scale back. And finally, as Nick mentions below, in less than a year she's already been promoted from analyst to Manager. If that isn't a rising star I don't know what is! 

    Supporting Material #1 (Nick Abruzzo - Vice President, Digital Strategy & Services, AMA): 

    • In terms of background I recruited Valerie in April of last year from the market research department within the AMA.  While Val did not have significant experience in digital analytics – I actively recruited her due to the quality of her previous work in market research and her passion for digital media.   After joining the digital strategy and services team Val took the helm in driving the enterprise-wide implementation of Google Analytics.   Not only did Val have to learn the various and complex nuances of digital analytics on the job, but she also had to gather and understand the requirements for the project from a very diverse group of internal stakeholders.   There were a total of 97 requirements that were gathered and implemented which resulted in over 1500 lines of code added to the corporate website.  Each requirement was aggressively reviewed and tested after implementation.  Stratigent (Google’s preferred implementation vendor) shared that the AMA’s implementation was the most complicated they’ve worked on to date.  In addition, they indicated Val has done an excellent job leading the effort as well.  The custom implementation of Google Analytics was delivered at the beginning of Q4 and the Membership, eCommerce, IT, and Enterprise Communications & Marketing teams have started to actively use the reports produced within GA. These reports have provided important insights in online visitor behavior – which are driving numerous changes to our online applications.   Not only was the GA implemented successfully, but Val also earned the trust and respect of her demanding internal clients. Overall, her client satisfaction rating was a 4.4 out of 5 – due to her tenacity, customer service focus and dedication to digital analytics.   Beyond the implementation, last year Val consistently demonstrated her ability to bring best practices to the role – and as a result, has improved our ability to gather and analyze digital analytics.  The best example of this is her leadership in managing Digital Analytics Round Table (DART).  Val has managed this task force, on her own – and has driven internal alignment on critical subjects with other analysts in the AMA. Through the DART Val has:   
    • led the adoption of a new social media publishing platform (Google Wildfire), to improve social analytics;
    • helped identify a new approach for tracking email;
    • led the development of a Hypothesis Library – to ensure we share what we know in terms of digital analytics. effectively across the organization.   It’s due to these accomplishments that I promoted Val to Digital Analytics Manager at the end of 2013.  

    In closing, given her promotion, and the progress she’s made in moving the AMA’s digital analytics capabilities forward I recommend that she be given the Rising Star Award by the Digital Analytics Association. 

    Supporting Material #2 (Adam McArdell - Senior Technical Consultant, Stratigent):

    • I’ve been working as a technical consultant in the web analytics space for roughly 5.5 years, and much of the time, the data collection process is a black box to clients that just puts the appropriate data into the tool to be reported.  What impressed me most with Val was her willingness to get her hands a bit dirty and work with me to better understand what was going on “behind the scenes”.  We sat together and ran through a laundry list of detailed requirements, testing them live to see what needed to be tweaked.  She took the time to get a feel for what some of the technical challenges were and how the solutions to those challenges are developed.  It isn’t often that I find business/marketing folks who care to know the details, and I realized that it wasn’t that she loved JavaScript as much as I did, she just cares about the analytics program.  She doesn’t just want to report the numbers, she wants to understand the story behind the numbers and use them to improve the online and marketing experiences.  She understands that analytics isn’t about reporting that total visits are up, so things are looking good.  It’s about identifying why those visits are up and utilizing that knowledge to make them go up even more.  Her enthusiasm and desire to get meaningful analysis from the data that is being reported is not only inspiring, but also a breath of fresh air.  Her passion for her work extends beyond her own company, as she has told me about multiple occasions where she has told others about all of the cool and interesting custom reporting she is able to do, helping others understand that there is so much more they can track, and so many reasons why they should pursue more meaningful data than a simple base tag can provide.  Val is truly a shining example of what an analyst should be to help the industry as a whole grow and prosper, and she hasn’t even been in her role for a year.

    Supporting Material #3 (Tamika Braxton - Sr. Digital Analytics Consultant, Stratigent): 

    Within an hour of meeting Val I was beyond impressed, I was speechless. I knew I had met someone that was not only a natural in the field, but also had that extra “x” factor that set her apart from 99% of those you meet in the industry.  That’s saying a lot considering I’m a consultant and have been in the industry almost 5 years – and worked in corporations for 10 years (i.e. I’ve worked with a LOT of people!). Anyone that has ever been the first and only Web Analyst in a large corporation understands the unique challenges, obstacles, and complexities that come with such a role. When I met Val she had been in her role for only a few months but her breadth of understanding was astonishing and vast. Not only did she “get” web analytics strategy, best practices, analysis, and reporting, but also it was clear that she had a solid understanding of the technical intricacies and implications. In addition to that, in her short-time in her role she had already helped several stakeholders (all levels of the company) understand the importance of web analytics, embrace it, and evolve in their thinking of it -  making her an undeniable agent of change in moving the organization into a more data-driven direction.  Val has such a passion, phenomenal personality, and natural gift for not only “doing” web analytics, but being a leader in the space that I have no doubt she will continue to rise (rapidly), and become a very well respected and recognized presence in the industry. There’s no limits to what Val can do, she’s amazing.
  • Chris Leone, Chief Operations Officer, WebStrategies Inc. Open to view Nominee Details

    I joined my digital agency in 2008 as the manager of online marketing, primarily managing PPC and SEO campaigns. I quickly learned that data, above all us, was critical to achieving meaningful results for my clients. From that point on, I became obsessed with learning all I could about the field of web analytics.   As I continued to develop my web analytics skills and experience, I noticed the lack of a web analytics advocate in our competitive market. This led me to pursue and ultimately achieve the Google Analytics Certified Partner status for my agency.   My first major public achievement in the field of web analytics came in August 2012, when my case study was featured on the Google Analytics blog. I was both the driver and lead analyst on this project.  Since that time, I have spoken at various events promoting a data-driven approach to online marketing. These events include the American Marketing Association, the Public Relations Society of America, and the WSI Global E&I Convention.   Through my speaking engagements, I was offered a semi-weekly contributor column for WorkIt Richmond magazine, a widely-read publication for SMBs in central Virginia. My pieces focus on digital marketing, and specifically, how to use data to measure and improve performance. WorkIt Richmond is the 2013 SBA award winner for outstanding small business advocacy and a division of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the second largest news publication in Virginia.   Some of my more recent and notable client projects include:

    • a 127% increase in online leads while reducing cost-per-acquisition by 12% for a large, national non-profit. Methods used include: multi-channel attribution analysis, user testing, CPA analysis, and segmentation (60k monthly uniques)
    • improving online sales in key regions by 70% through improved cart abandonment (Google Analytics case study) for an online food retailer. Methods used include custom tracking configurations, a/b testing, segmentation, and data analysis. (192k monthly uniques)
    • analyzing the real-time online impact of a national TV promotion for a well-known, North American home appliance manufacturer. (323k monthly uniques)
    • identifying correlations and marketing opportunities by analyzing online application data for customers requesting online car insurance quotes (126k monthly uniques).

    Today, I consider myself one of the largest advocates in the central Virginia business community for using a data-driven approach to online marketing. I am always challenging clients to shift their paradigm from a traffic building approach to an outcome and conversion-driven approach.   I truly feel fortunate that I have found something I love to do, something I believe I do very well, and something that has led me to much success so early in my career. I look forward to further developing my craft going forward and am very excited for the future of our industry.   Samples of my work will follow shortly. I appreciate any and all consideration for this award.
    Writing:

    Blog post promo
    Speaking: 

    • Social Media Measurement
      Richmond VA PRSA, February 2012
      Event page
      Slides (pdf)
    • Buying Wins, Reducing Waste, and Gaining Insight
      Triangle AMA Chapter (Raleigh NC)
      Speaker List

    Endorsements: 

    • Allie Vered, ClearPoint Credit Counseling CMO (client)
      "Chris Leone and his team at WebStrategies have proven themselves an invaluable asset to ClearPoint’s digital strategy. Always keeping an eye on business trends, Chris has provided constant support, advice and options on how to maximize effectiveness using web analytics. His counsel, never biased or self-interested, and clearly focused on our business goals, has been instrumental to our success online. We have seen strong return on investment campaigns supported and informed by Chris."
    • Brian McDonald, Digital Marketing Manager at Parata Systems (speaking review)
      "Chris graciously came and spoke to the Triangle AMA on analytics in a common sense and easy to understand way. Web analytics can be complex and Chris did a great job using easy to understand, real world examples that proved the point in an engaging way. An excellent presenter and he knows his stuff."
    • Susan Higgins, Worth Higgins & Associates: (client)
      "Chris Leone and his team have made it their business to learn our brand, our product, our market and our competition and then, combined with their own expertise and experience, they brought that knowledge to bear in help making our business succeed. Chris communicates well at Erica’s high level of sophistication and on my novice level. We have both learned from him. He makes recommendations based on analysis, and stays in touch between meetings to fine tune strategy. And, in spite of a having to work with a website with a less than elegant back end, his work has resulted in measurable improvement in traffic and conversions.”
    • John Antil, University of Delaware (speaking review)
      "Chris is exceptional in many ways that are rare to find in a young executive. His depth of knowledge is outstanding and is critical to achieving success in an ever changing digital world. He is one of the few that actually seems to not only know what he is doing, but gets exceptional results.”
  • Brian Lugtu, Senior Analyst, Adobe Open to view Nominee Details

    Brian Lugtu works at Adobe and works on the Analytics and Optimization team.  Note that this team is part of the GMO (i.e. Global Marketing Organization) within Adobe and is *NOT* part of the "Ominture" Business.  Our team is the internal Digital Analytics team that analyzes Adobe.com for our business stakeholders.  Note that I, Andrew Bakonyi, run the Analytics and Optimization team.  Brian Lugtu reports into a manager that in turn reports into me.  We have about 20 Digital/Web Analysts throughout Adobe.  For this award I polled the entire Digital/Web Analytics community at Adobe and by far Brian Lugtu was the person that best exemplified a "Digital Analytics Rising Star".  Note that Brian used to work at Walmart.com as a Digital Analyst before coming to Adobe.  Here are some key reasons why people voted for him:

    • He is responsible for providing Digital Analytics insights for the ecommerce team which is by far the most demanding team at Adobe. He has consistently been able to meet their incredibly high expectations while at the same time build really solid working relationships.
    • The ecommerce team (Rob Giglio, VP & Eric Cox, Sr. Director) awarded him with their "AWESOME AWARD".  Here are the details:  Our team votes every month to recognize someone within our organization who has been going above and beyond to help drive our success.  For the month of August a number of folks voted to recognize you, as an extended team member, for all that you do to help improve our ability to analyze and understand our online business.  Your hard work and constant willingness to partner with us on difficult issues is truly appreciated.  Here is the quote submitted to nominate you, and what we shared with our worldwide team yesterday during the meeting:  Brian Lugtu: is a Senior Analyst in the Marketing Insights and Operations Team.  He is our GO-TO person for any web analytics question and has always helped to analyze the impact of projects like Cayenne, or enhancements like launching AMEX in Japan.  But most recently, Brian was a key participant in helping us deep-dive the EMEA online business to identify opportunities for conversion improvement.   And – along with being responsible for publishing the weekly “Last Touch” report that gives insight into how our Marketing spend is performing for us, he also recently partnered with our team to create a “conversion dashboard” that helps our sales team track performance of the website and conversion funnel, so that we’re better equipped to make data-driven decisions.  One of the best things about working with Brian is his attitude.  No matter how complicated the ask, he always has a smile on his face when he says “yes, we can get you that data”.
    • Brian has begun actively participating in the Digital Analytics community.  This year he attended the DAA Annual Awards Dinner, participated in XChange, and also developed close relationships with other industry practitioners at Adobe Summit.
    • Here are a number of other deliverables that people cited when voting for Brian:
    • SiteCatalyst "Reboot": Brian did a very thorough UAT for the SiteCatalyst Reboot making sure that all of the detailed ecommerce variables and events were correctly tagged across all of the Adobe "Stores" (i.e. US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Spain, etc. more than 50 properties in all).  Brian uncovered several bugs that were completely missed by everyone else on the team which is a testament to his thoroughness, persistence, dependability, and the high bar that he sets for himself.  - another Senior Analyst colleague of Brian Lugtu
    • ECommerce Funnel Reports : Brian worked very hard to create an ecommerce funnel dashboard which helped stakeholders get insights into the funnel performance on every step of the customer journey.  The report leverages 10 different Discover projects and integrates them along with offline transaction data into Excel and provides users with a dozen different filters that allow them to drill down and do dynamic comparisons on the exact views that they need to optimize their business. - another Senior Analyst colleague of Brian Lugtu
    • Ecommerce Training: Brian pulled together a customized training program tailored for the specific needs of the ecommerce team.  It not only taught them the fundamentals of how to use SiteCatalyst but used specific ecommerce 'use cases' to ensure that the content was relevant for the team.  He researched the most used reports and the areas of greatest interest to the ecommerce team. Finally, he delivered this training to the ecommerce team himself. - Rob Liebscher, Sr. Manager and direct manager of Brian Lugtu  - Collaboration: Brian was also considered the GO-TO person to help onboard several new Analysts to Adobe this year. Further, he even went "above and beyond" his duties to help the Testing team better analyze their tests by using SiteCatalyst.  Here is a direct quote from a colleague:    "Having worked in Adobe Consulting for 5 years, I can say that Lugtu is one of the most knowledgeable people in terms of SiteCatalyst and Discover. He helped me analyze a very complex ecommerce test by showing me how to pull all the metrics and create custom segments for everything we wanted to track. I owe all my Discover knowledge that I've gained in the past year to him." - another Senior Analyst of Testing colleague of Brian Lugtu
    • Marketing Channels Report: Brian single handedly re-created a report that shows the performance of Adobe's Marketing Channels.  The previous report was static and was distributed three weeks in arrears so Stakeholders had stopped using it.  However, given the spend that Adobe puts into Paid Media it was critical to understand the performance of our Marketing Channels which was creating a long list of Ad Hoc requests each week.  Brian volunteered to re-engineer the report and created a dynamic Excel report complete with filters that Stakeholders could use to zero on in the exact information they needed for their own needs.  Moreover, this report utilized several different data sources (i.e. SiteCatalyst, Discover, SAP, HANA, etc.) for both online and offline data yet Brian was able to figure out a way to automate the report so that it could be distributed Sunday night in time for the critical sales meetings that occur on Monday mornings.  The VP of Ecommerce, Rob Giglio, considers this report to be one of his most critical sources of insight and waits for it each Sunday evening.

    NOTE: I would love to supply examples of Brian's work but unfortunately the data is highly confidential to Adobe.  Needless to say, his reports and dashboards are considered the 'gold standard' and are used by other analysts as a template for their own deliverables.  Finally, and most importantly, Brian is not only impeccable when it comes to WHAT he contributes but also HOW he contributes:

    • Broadest Skillset: Not only does Brian know all of the details of SiteCatalyst and Discover but he is also an expert in SQL and is able to query Adobe's SAP/HANA database to pull in offline data to supplement his Digital Analytics reports, dashboards, and analysis.
    • Attitude: In the highly detailed world of Analytics where data can sometimes be used as a political weapon Brian has distinguished himself as a trusted advisor.  Everyone at Adobe, both his teammates and his stakeholders, actively seek out his opinions.  He is usually the 'last word' on the most difficult analytics issues and yet he is very humble and is an absolutely great team player.  He is dependable and manages an exhaustive queue of demands with ease.
    Brian truly exemplifies all of the attributes of a DAA Rising Star
  • Rick McFarland, VP, Corporate Data Services, Hearst Corporation Open to view Nominee Details

    Rick is pioneering the use of audience data to drive new content experiences and insights across a diverse set of media businesses.  The ability to identify and aggregate the data effectively has been one challenge that was conquered. The focus on consumer insights and bringing a real connection between content and audience through data has been a breakthrough.

  • James McNulty, SEO Manager, Smith Monitoring Open to view Nominee Details

    He has provided this company with a huge insight to our KPI's and has increased ROI.

  • Chris Meares, Director of Analytics Consulting, MaassMedia, LLC. Open to view Nominee Details

    A recent member of the DAA, Chris joined MaassMedia as Director of Analytics Consulting in 2013. Prior to that, he had worked at Philly.com, Semphonic, and Ernst&Young in various high level digital analytics roles. Despite the short time he has been with the MaassMedia, he has become a vital asset to both his clients and colleagues.  A data enthusiast and technology whiz, Chris has a prolific portfolio of experience with content, retail, and lead generation websites that expands across industries. It is this diverse exposure that allows him to employ truly unique perspectives for each new client. More than that, what makes him really effective and invaluable is his eagerness to go above and beyond, to bring insights that are helpful and ideas that continue to benefit clients for a long time to come.  A frequent contributor to discussions on multiple blogs and LinkedIn groups as well as the #measure digital analytics community, Chris is always ready to share one ideas or two, to push the envelope and explore the possibilities of new techniques and practice. Within MaassMedia, he is always glad to troubleshoot problems or answer any questions. A team player and community builder, he also commits to further the whole team's knowledge and capacity by experimenting with new technology and sharing the results every two weeks.  Chris's keen analytical skills, passion for analytics, and earnest desire to further the analytics community make him a rising star in our association. We can expect great contribution from him in the coming years.

  • Peter O'Neill, Founder & Lead Consultant, L3 Analytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Peter has been a powerhouse of community-building in the UK and Europe.  He is a Certified Web Analyst who started MeasureCamp, the extremely popular unconference in London and programmed and MC'd last year's eMetrics Summit in London.  He also co-founded MeasureBowling, a European wide event and is running a monthly London Digital Analytics meetup group.

    Peter is a premier industry promoter with a deep background in digital analytics including market research at Ask.com, implementation consultant with Nedstat (purchased by comScore), senior consultant with Logan Todd (purchased by PwC), and for the last three and a half years, running his own consultancy.  Peter is passionate about the subject matter and the industry and, despite having been around so long, deserves recognition as a Rising Star due to his recent spurt in visibility.

    http://uk.linkedin.com/in/peteroneill
    http://www.l3analytics.com/about-l3/who-we-are/ 
    https://twitter.com/peter_oneill
    http://www.measurecamp.org/
    http://www.measurebowling.org/
    http://www.emetrics.org/london
    http://www.meetup.com/London-Web-Analytics-Google-Analytics-OmnitureMVT/

  • Sebastian Pospischil, Head of Analytics, e-wolff Consulting GmbH Open to view Nominee Details

    Sebastian is always up-to-date with the newest technologies and solutions in digital analytics. I learned last year a lot from him, and I will be developed through the suggestions and plans of Sebastian.

    About:
    Sebastian started his career in the Online Business while studying technically oriented business administration. In 2003 he founded & developed kunstform?! BMX Shop as a Selfmade Nerd and began to work with Web Analytics Tools in 2005.

    Sebastian joined e-wolff Consulting GmbH in 2008. After initially working in the areas of SEA, SEO and social, he specialized quite early on Web Analytics & Testing. Responsible for all relevant Google Conversion Certifications at e-wolff, Sebastian is now Head of Analytics and leads an ever-growing team of skilled colleagues. Besides that, Sebastian is a professor teaching web analytics at the Social Media Academy, Entrepeneur, BMX Pro - and most important - happy husband & father of two kids.

    Client Feedback:
    “Sebastian is always up-to-date with the newest technologies and solutions in digital analytics. I learned a lot from him last year, and I will be developed through the suggestions and plans of Sebastian.â€Â

     

    Links:
    Analytics Blog - http://www.e-wolff.de/blog
    BMX Blog – http://www.seppl-bmx.com
    LinkedIn – http://linkedin.com/in/sebastianp

  • Jeff Sauer, CEO/Founder, Jeffalytics. Principal at Three Deep Marketing Open to view Nominee Details

    Jeff has truly established himself as a strong thought leader in the space of digital analytics in 2013. His blog, Depth of Knowledge (jeffalytics.com) features excellent insights into Google's ranking algorithm, making the most of your social media measurement, and diving into deeper analyses with Google Analytics. He published two excellent pieces this year that have gone viral, one as a case study into the ranking correlation between Google+ social signals and the Periodic Table of Google Analytics. 

    After leading the efforts to make his company a Google Analytics Certified Partner, Jeff has taught intensive Google Analytics classroom sessions for over 200 people since 2011 and spoken on the joys of Google Analytics to an international audience of thousands of people.

    Jeff has written columns for the Google Analytics blog and even was a guest on Moz's monthly mozinar. He puts his knowledge to good use by providing analytics for local non-profit associations and clients, helping install and monitor Google Analytics on hundreds of websites.
  • Krista Seiden, Product Marketing Manager, Google Open to view Nominee Details

    Krista has been leading the charge to overhaul analytics and optimization within a number of Google's business units. In one short year at Google she has revamped the analytics implementation for a large number of sites, including the introduction of tag management, introduced more detailed analytics tracking to better answer business questions and made testing a large-scale practice by building an internal testing platform and scaling testing efforts by more than 1500%. In addition, Krista is a frequent speaker at industry events not only in the United States, but around the world. She is a frequent contributor to industry blogs and the Twitter #measure community, a mentor for the Analysis Exchange, and an active member of the industry as a Co-Chair of the DAA San Francisco chapter. With what she has achieved in just a short few years, we can expect great things from her in the coming years.

  • Ryan Sleeper, Manager of Data Visualization & Analysis, Evolytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Ryan Sleeper has been in the digital analytics space for less than five years and has already achieved significant accomplishments and has made an impact within the analytics industry. In the last year, Ryan has emerged as one of the most recognizable names in data visualization as he is the international Tableau Iron Viz Champion. Ryan won a series of Data Viz contests that positioned him to compete for the Iron Viz Championship at Tableau’s latest customer conference. Ryan and the other contestants were given a very large data set, and in front of a room full of conference attendees, as well as a panel of judges, they were given 20 minutes to create the best Data Viz. Based on votes from the judges as well as the audience, Ryan won the contest to claim the title of international Tableau Iron Viz Champion.   Ryan, as Manager of Data Visualization & Analysis at Evolytics, has built a professional career on providing data visualization best practices to forward-thinking brands. In this role, he also conducted enterprise-wide training sessions on Data Visualization, mentoring analysts on frameworks, tool set capabilities, and tips and tricks for optimizing marketing analytic visual outputs. In addition to dedicating his work day to the advancement of digital analytics practices, Ryan is actively involved in the analytics and data visualization community as he leads the Kansas City Tableau User Group, where he often offers hands-on support to members in the group who are just beginning to learn about analytics and the benefits of data visualization tools such as Tableau.  Ryan, with just a few years in the analytics discipline, has become a frequent conference speaker, including the Tableau Customer Conference, Exact Target Conference and the eMetrics Summit. Ryan is also a member of the Digital Analytics Association.  As an avid sports fan and self-proclaimed “data junkie,” Ryan often shares unique sports data visualizations on his personal blog OSMGuy.com as well as innovative data visualizations on Evolytics’ blog at Evolytics.com.

  • Jake Winter, Sr. Digital Analytics Manager, Ameriprise Financial Open to view Nominee Details

    Jake possesses a unique ability to effectively translate complex data into business stories. He's successfully built allies with key stakeholders by winning their trust using his ability to interpret data needs and fulfill them with insightful analysis. Jake is a leader who has charged his small team to accomplish more than many organizations can do with a full staff. Jake Winter is a rising star in digital analytics.

Practitioner of the Year (Individual)

  • Autumn Arbury, Grp Mgr, Web Rptg/Analysis - Global Marketing Operations, Microsoft Open to view Nominee Details

    Whether driving day-to-day best practices around taxonomy development or instrumentation and reporting within Microsoft or while addressing the DAA audience at a regional meeting, Autumn demands attention. Why, does she demand this positive attention, you may ask?  We, in Digital Marketing, pride ourselves on creating new ways to gain insight into a customer, into a visitor, but sometimes we struggle to make that insight available to others in consumable ways and/or taking the next step and making that information actionable in a way that effects our businesses in a positive light. Autumn has a way of doing both while driving everything from acquisition to conversion!   

    As the leader of a group of Senior Digital Analysts utilizing a suite of digital marketing solutions, Autumn provides a platform for various groups within Microsoft to gain insight and to begin to understand consumer behavior on the microsoft.com (MSCOM) websites. Based upon the outcome of such analysis/findings, the business groups within Microsoft create new and positive online interactions with site visitors.  

    By producing such analysis, reporting, and optimization recommendations that drive digital marketing activity to be relevant and impactful to Microsoft's business (such as generating sales online, trial downloads, partner referrals, and social sharing activity), Autumn plays a strategic role in allowing Microsoft to make their intelligence actionable and repeatable across multiple business groups (connecting the visitor journey across Microsoft properties): ultimately leading to a better experience for the visitor and ultimately revenue for the company.  

    It is no easy task to create standards within such a behemoth as Microsoft. It is no easy task to coordinate a single view of visitor. It is no easy task to tie together a plethora of technologies. It is no easy task to create a mechanism for the dissemination of data and the recommendation process for envoking change. That challenge does not slow Autumn down. She continues to provide visibility and recommendation at senior levels within her business and be the go-to-person for solutions that drive internal services within the Microsoft environment - becoming a model for others within the company.

  • David Booth, Co-founder & Partner, Cardinal Path Open to view Nominee Details

    I would like to nominate David Booth for “Practitioner of the Year”. It’s a big title and one which I’m confident personifies the devotion that this nominee has had both to the industry and his craft in 2013 and for many years prior.  

    David is a stand out for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that he quite possibly trained more people on how to use Google to grow their business than any other person in the world, travelling to countless locations across the globe and sharing his passion and knowledge with others. 

    Who is David Booth? He is a dedicated and passionate analytics and digital marketing entrepreneur and evangelist, who now works at Cardinal Path – a company he co-founded when he merged his previous firm (Webshare) with two others in 2011.   

    Over this past year alone, David has:

    • Spoken at multiple conferences on digital marketing and analytics in the US and Europe;
    • Been a featured speaker for Google Engage, keynoting events in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Belgium, the US, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Argentina, Hong Kong, and Greece (to name a few);
    • Published a monthly column on analytics for MediaPost.com
    • Taught a masters-level course on web analytics and online marketing at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
    • Wrote and recorded an SEO Fundamentals as well as updated to his popular Lynda.com course on Google AdWords with a focus on measurement and analysis;
    • Toured in support of the book he co-authored, Display Advertising: An Hour a Day (Wiley, 2012);
    • Been a prolific sharer of information to the thousands of people who have him in their G+ circles, and follow him via Twitter.
    • As a founder and executive team member with Cardinal Path, helped to grow the business by +50% in 2013  

    He did all this while working to support clients to deliver on aggressive goals, including Mercedes-Benz USA, NPR, Merck, Electronic Arts, Chevron, Papa John’s, Universal Music Group, etc.  As a Senior Partner, he has been instrumental at setting and driving the evolution of the company, working with clients across five continents in web analytics and business intelligence, statistical analysis and testing, technology selection and deployment, and online and search marketing. 

    A core belief of David’s is to share knowledge and give back to the community that helped him to succeed (and you know this to be true if you’ve ever emailed him a question at 2am and received a reply at 2:15 am!).   Sharing his knowledge and passion for all things digital marketing and analytics related is evident in the courses he’s authored and recorded for Lynda.com (Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals, Google AdWords Essential Training and Google Website Optimizer Essential Training), or helping others as a technical editor (e.g. Performance Marketing with Google Analytics and Google Analytics Essential Training).  He has also trained tens of thousands of people over the years as one of the original Google AdWords and Google Analytics certified instructors via Google’s Seminars for Success (now Cardinal Path Training). 

    For someone whose obvious love of this industry permeates everything he does, it’s worth noting how he got his start in digital marketing. Where did David’s passion for digital marketing come from? Many years ago, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala and applied his skills to promote local Fair Trade and Eco-Tourism industries, setting up websites that enabled 20 local non-profits to engage in e-commerce with markets in North America and Western Europe as well as receive grants from around the world. A globe-trotter even before he became one of the world’s most well-respected authorities on using Google and analytics for digital marketing, he spent part of his youth working his way through countries like South Africa by helping people with their computer problems. It’s in this same spirit of knowledge-sharing, a desire to help others, and a sense of being ahead of the curve that David approaches his career and his life.  

    By any objective measure, this is a body of work, and a year of achievements, that clearly distinguishes David from among his peers – even those as accomplished as surely the other nominees are.  It is, in my view, what merits him being nominated as Practitioner of the Year and worthy of consideration of your vote.

    View the supporting materials for David Booth.

  • Brandon Bunker, Sr. Director of Customer Analytics and Intelligence, Vivint  Open to view Nominee Details

    Brandon Bunker represents the future of digital marketing and is a true thought leader for our industry. He is innovating with ideas and solutions at the intersection of marketing, analytics, and technology. He posses an incredible vision for where our industry is going and is passionate about changing our industry for the better.  

    Brandon has been an early adopter and innovator around tag and data management, integrating analytics into display advertising, and incorporating predictive analytics into his optimization and personalization programs. All of which have generated significant value for his organization time and time again. 

    He is also a very accomplished industry speaker who often delivers the best presentations, whether its at Adobe Summit, Web Analytics Demystified Accelerate, Ensighten Agility, Semphonic X-Change, or eMetrics. 

    Some examples of his insights and successes over the years can be found here:  http://vimeo.com/60054647
    http://online-behavior.com/emetrics/marketing-metrics-for-cmo
    http://www.slideshare.net/Ensighten/accel-2011-sonybrandonbunker
    http://www.pointmarc.com/brandon-bunker-data-syndication-blog.html

    He has also been recognized as Adobe marketer of the month. 

    For all the reasons mentioned above I highly recommend Brandon Bunker for consideration for DAA Practitioner of the Year.

  • Blandon Casenave, Vice President, Digital Media Research, NBC Universal Open to view Nominee Details

    Under Blandon's wise leadership, NBC Universal has consistently set the tone as the benchmark for measuring and optimizing video in the digital space - be it on the web, mobile, social and now set-top boxes. Blandon's pioneering work in this area is well overdue for recognition by the DAA community, especially in a world where we are seeing a dramatic growth in digital video usage (and with it, the need to measure it) across all industry verticals, for both B2B and B2C digital marketing. Blandon's teams were (and continue to be) highly innovative in measuring how video players are used, shared, and contribute to business success; cross-platform video measurement (the 1st ever "3 screen" video measurement exercise, in the 2010 Olympics); and now work in such areas such as "TV Everywhere" (viewing cable TV where ever and whenever you want) and highly digital set-top boxes. His insights and approaches on how to optimize digital video have filtered through other media companies, and via his generous sharing at conferences, into other industry verticals as well, becoming best practices for digital video measurement. Digital video will continue to grow and expand for the foreseeable future; Blandon's influential work in understanding, explaining and improving this medium will continue to have an ongoing impact.

    This is why Blandon - especially in an area of content marketing, with video as a now-core content tactic - deserves overdue recognition as the 2013 DAA Practitioner of the Year.

  • Jonathan Corbin, Manager, Insurance and Finance, Adobe Open to view Nominee Details

    Jonathan exemplifies excellence in managing analytics programs and teams for the world's largest companies.  His efforts to help evolve the digital analytics industry through his ongoing leadership of the Boston Local DAA Chapter as well as his global thought leadership for Adobe products and with his clients is commendable.

  • Aaron Efland, Director of Technology, TopSpot Internet Marketing Open to view Nominee Details

    In 2013, Aaron was promoted from Analytics Implementation Manager to Director of Technology at TopSpot Internet Marketing. He began as a Web Analytics Engineer at TopSpot in 2009. Aaron’s distinct ability to easily explain technical concepts and his mastery of analytic tools allows him to navigate TopSpot’s analytic strategies in our ever-evolving industry.  He continues to update the team on the latest changes from Google Analytics, Insite Metrics and our call tracking. He was also a key participant in creating our latest reporting structure, which is pulled from Google Analytics APIs and custom reports he's created. I'll send a sample. TopSpot is a data-driven company and our reporting allows us to stand out among our competitors.  In November, he presented at Web Analtyics Wednesday by the Web Analytics Houston LinkedIn group. I'll attach his presentation "Not All Conversions Are Created Equal."

  • Joseph Gordon, Director of Research, U-T San Diego Open to view Nominee Details

    Joseph Gordon’s track record advancing digital analytics in the publishing sector is a model in marketing best practices. He has spent the past 13 years as an exemplary digital-analytics practitioner, leading prominent newspapers to greater profitability through marketing analytics, social media, research and optimization. Over the past two and a half years, in his role as Research Director with top-25 national daily U-T San Diego, Gordon has launched digital-analytics and social-media initiatives that meet aggressive goals of increasing revenue 15 percent year-over-year. Before joining U-T San Diego, he held management positions at The Portland Oregonian and The Sacramento Bee and marketing positions at ADVO (now Valassis) and Johnson & Johnson. His efforts have garnered Best in Show awards from the Newspaper Assn. of America and International Newsmedia Marketing Assn., as well as multiple accolades from ACME. 

    When Gordon joined U-T San Diego in June 2011, the publisher was transitioning to a paid content model, which has caused 40 percent readership declines at many typical news organizations. Despite the paywall and the dire state of the news industry in general, Gordon has leveraged digital analytics for uncovering best practices for monetizing content.  By year-end 2013, Gordon achieved the following impressive results, enabling a profitable and growing media organization: 

    • Increased audience size 12 percent post paywall
    • Increased pageviews of behind-the-paywall editorial content by nearly 25 percent, exceeding expectation by nearly 10 percent
    • Increased ad CTRs by as much as 1,400 percent over industry averages
    • Realized nearly 1/3 more ratings and increased revenue by accurately calculating audience sizes 

    Gordon supports the news, advertising, marketing, circulation, digital media and business development departments – each of which has a different monetization strategy and each of which has its own data streams. He uses Anametrix, a cloud-based, marketing-analytics platform, to track the response and monetization rate of every aspect of each digital channel, including content, photography, video and ads. He works closely with reporters and photographers on using the analytics reports to increase content monetization – both on the site and through referrals from their social-media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest – based on which headlines drive social traffic and how much social engagement impacts readership. For web content, U-T San Diego uses Anametrix to compare all stories to see how many page views they garner and then layers on ad units to monetize every story. Each reporter is accountable for his or her traffic and is expected to use the analytics platform to increase traffic with social media, as well as to judge which stories should get the most production time.  

    Gordon has achieved several milestones that set a new bar for the news organization. Despite a paywall introduction, the audience size is up 12 percent. The management team credits analytics for helping the editorial staff achieve this through content optimization.  Real-time performance monitoring has helped the editorial staff increase pageviews of their original content by nearly 25 percent. With more traffic and content, ad revenue is up and continuing to grow. Transparent daily reporting is helping ad reps optimize advertisers’ multichannel ad campaigns, in some cases increasing CTRs as much as 1,400 percent over industry averages. With accurate numbers for total audience impressions, broadcast ad revenue alone is up 33 percent. And this is just the beginning; U-T San Diego plans to extend its application of marketing analytics to create a new paradigm for profitability at a news media company. 

    Joseph Gordon offers publishers and other marketing professionals a proven example of best practices in digital analytics, including direct impact on revenue. While most marketing organizations have the ability to track campaign activities and results, Gordon takes his profession to the next level by analyzing the data in real time to gain insights that enable U-T San Diego to make rapid adjustments to optimize campaigns and monetize content. He and his colleagues can better understand reader habits and respond immediately to subtle changes based on topics, demographics, and technological or cultural shifts. The future of the new media is here, and this digital-analytics practitioner is writing the rulebook.

    View the supporting material for Joseph Gordon.

  • Michael Healy, Data Scientist, Search Discovery Open to view Nominee Details

    Michael was the technical lead for the country's first higher education analytics solution, CourseSmart Analytics1, which seamlessly enabled learning analytics for participating universities into a cohesive reporting suite.

    CourseSmart Analytics was designed and built by Michael to scalably handle the data integration task for several disparate data sources, while maintaining appropriate access control rights, with the goal of "improving retention, controlling costs, and improving learning outcomes."2

    The IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc., whose mission is to "advance technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment"3 recognized the significance of the development with their Platinum prize at the Learning Impact Awards in the new R&D Initiative category.4

    Aside from industry recognition, CourseSmart Analytics was widely covered by news outlets including the NY Times, Information Week, Campus Technology and more.

    CourseSmart Analytics, along with the proprietary CourseSmart Engagement Index, were independently studied and determined that they provide "an unobtrusive, real-time method to identify students at risk of academic failure."5

    Currently Michael works for Search Discovery6 where he continues to do pioneering work in the area of analytics product development.

    1. http://www.coursesmart.com/go/institutions/analytics
    2. "CourseSmart Analytics: Using Data to Transform Teaching, Learning and Institutional Accountability"
    3. http://www.imsglobal.org/aboutims.html
    4. http://www.imsglobal.org/pressreleases/pr130516.html
    5. Reynol Junco and Candrianna Clem, 'Evaluating How the CourseSmart Engagement Index Predicts Student Outcomes"
    6. http://www.searchdiscovery.com/about/team/michael-healy/

    View the supporting material for Michael Healy.

  • John Holland, Sr Manager Analytics, Online, The Home Depot Open to view Nominee Details

    John continues to ensure that The Home Depot's online presence is on the vanguard of innovation. John is a master of extracting maximum value from the technologies he uses, and is always willing to try new tools and techniques. In 2013 John drove both mobile site and app initiatives including deployment of highly optimized Adobe Target on mobile and tablet sites, and the implementation of an impressively deep Site Catalyst deployment on two separate high visibility mobile apps across both iOS and Android platforms. John is a big believer in the importance of data, and was one of the first to implement a solid and consistent data layer on every page, separate from the front end updates that would play havoc with his measurement efforts. John is also very active in the measurement community, and his ability to deal with teams, trends, partners and vendors is another one of his strengths. His skills and leadership in digital measurement is not only a significant component of his success to date, it is a key reason why his group is poised to assume a pivotal role in Home Depot's vision for a 2014 marked by significant growth in online data and the mobile experience.

  • Amit Jai Kadam; Director, Digital Data & Analytics, Spark Open to view Nominee Details

    I am nominating Amit Jai Kadam, director of Analytics at Spark for the DAA Award of Excellence in the “Practitioner of the Year” category.

    Amit is a business leader with diverse experience in digital strategy and marketing analytics. He led the advanced analytics team at SMG Performance Marketing to drive business performance through marketing activation for several brands. During this three-year period, I worked with him on several projects where he mentored me professionally.  

    His approach towards analytical consulting and the basics of problem solving in media marketing helps team members to think in the right direction. His vision towards evangelizing the applications of statistics to digital marketing is an inspiration to me and many of the other contacts he has through his professional network.

    His other areas of expertise include media optimization and data-driven programmatic RTB. Amit’s passion for measuring digital media helped him lead & build an in-house digital attribution product – PathFinder – and take it to global level, leading to business wins for the company.  Recognizing his work in this area, Amit and his team are nominated this year as a finalist for an SMG Global one Award – an internal award that recognizes the best work in the agency’s network, spanning more than 100 offices around the world. 

    Besides his contributions to the company, Amit has also contributed greatly to the development of the local DAA chapter, serving our growing digital community.  As a Co-chair of the DAA Chicago chapter, he played an instrumental role in the planning of several local events and served as the moderator for the attribution panel in last fall’s DAA Symposium. Amit is a strong communicator of ideas. Some that I have personally witnessed and benefited from include his contributions as speaker at industry conferences like Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit, MediaPost’s OMMA RTB and Business Intelligence Summit.

    I have known Amit as a great teacher and a mentor. Through my association with him on the Marketing Analytics and Data Mining Advisory board at Oklahoma State University, I have keenly observed the important role he plays as an adjunct faculty, creating and teaching a digital marketing & web analytics course every fall. Amit also continues to evolve, as he is someone who believes in knowledge sharing and encourages everyone to stay on top of current technology in the digital advertising industry.

    In addition to the above, outside his professional life, Amit is someone who truly provides a 360-degree view to life – whether it is celebrating his son’s birthday, where he led all the kids’ games, or his active interest in yoga as a dedicated practitioner; a passion for life that he eagerly shares with others.

    In summary, I would say that all the above reasons stand as solid proof of Amit’s credibility. I nominate and strongly recommend him as a potential candidate for the practitioner of the year award.

    For more about Spark: http://www.sparksmg.com/

  • Nancy Koons, Senior Manager, Web Analytics, Vail Resorts Inc. Open to view Nominee Details

    Nancy has accepted invitations to share her knowledge at industry conferences, and been recognized by industry veterans for the quality of information she shares.  In 2013 she shared her tips for analytics success at the Adobe Summit, and social media measurement tips and practices at eMetrics SF.  

    Nancy has led the digital analytics team at Vail Resorts for several years.  Over the past year, she has led a transformation of the utilization of web data within the business.  Her team’s internal clients (multiple groups spanning 8 ski resorts and a large corporate organization) are using web data to help predict and forecast business, inform the timing and content of campaigns to granular segments of customers, and driving strategic decisions across the marketing organization. Nancy has led projects to ensure the organization can optimize both desktop and mobile guest experiences, including the 4th generation of EpicMix, Vail Resorts’ on mountain digital application.

    View the supporting materials for Nancy Koons.

  • Christopher Marin, Director, Digital Marketing Platform, Computer Sciences Corporation Open to view Nominee Details

    Christopher Marin has been working at CSC since 2002 and is in charge of their digital marketing platform and analytics efforts. His team includes roles as diverse as Data Scientist, Analyst, Developer, Architect, Marketing Automation Specialist, System Administrator and QA.  While that may seem like an eclectic collection of people, Chris firmly believes that we must go beyond simply generating actionable insights.  Instead, the future we should strive towards is one in which elements of Prescriptive Analytics dominate. Using hard won insights to build and perfect models, which in turn directly and automatically influence the experience of prospects across all channels is an exciting future to contemplate. His team is actively working towards that endeavor using a combination of off the shelf and custom-built components.

    Recent projects include:

    Lead Redesign of CSC.com
    Chris headed up a redesign and revamp effort leveraging Adobe Analytics solution which allows CSC marketers to make sense of its multichannel data, leading to a 265% year-over-year increase in marketing lead generation and additional sales. 

    Avinash Kaushik (Author, Digital Marketing Evangelist - Google, Co-founder - Market Motive) recently praised this work on the site.  He wrote:
    Your first job is to beat [CSC] at everything.
    http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-analytics-ladder-step-by-step-success/

    A quick overview of that project is available in this short video:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlVqmDr8TTI

    Lead effort to create Global Marketing Dashboard
    This GoodData dashboard leveraged a number of models created by Chris and his team (with contributions from Keboola and Adobe Consulting):

    • A model was created which determined Marketing's contribution to Opportunity Amounts with data sourced from Salesforce, Eloqua and Adobe.  It differentiates between Marketing Sourced and Assisted levels of influence in terms of dollar amounts as well as between Pipeline and Closed Won deals.
    • A Campaign Attribution model was created which also features the same distinctions of Marketing Sourced/Marketing Assisted/Pipeline/TCV.  It also however, gives appropriate credit to leads at various stages.
    • Multiple Marketing Channel Attribution models were built in Adobe Workbench and the results are fed into the dashboard.
    • A funnel advancement model was created that is intended to demonstrate Marketing's overall contribution to the funnel.  This is important given CSC's new emphasis on Account Based Marketing and Inside Sales, which blurs the traditional distinctions between Sales and Marketing.  A point-based system was designed that takes into account Marketing's contribution to lead progression along various stages.
    • A content scoring model was created that takes into account many factors including contribution to Marketing Leads, SEO indicators, and various other measures of engagement.  Data is sourced from both Adobe and ActiveStandards.

    This Prezi contains additional details related to the dashboard:
    http://prezi.com/mnfpucn2xdjx/marketing-data-perfect-together/

    Personalization Enablement System
    Chris designed and built a real-time personalization enablement system that takes input from various sources in a weighted fashion, as well as factors such as recency and frequency, and computes scores along various dimensions at both the individual and account level.  Certain traits are shared between the account and the associated individuals, to generate blended profile data, which in turn is fed into various systems for personalization and reporting needs.

    CSC CMS
    Chris designed and built much of the Content Management System that lies at the heart of CSC's complex Digital Marketing Ecosystem, which currently contains close to 50 highly integrated systems.

    Other

    • Chris was Adobe's Marketer of the Month in June of last year:

    http://www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-marketing/marketer-of-the-month.html

    • Adobe's CSC Case Study, where Chris was interviewed, is available here:

    https://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/2014%20Excellence%20Awards/practitionerofyear/Christopher%20Marin_13_suitestories_csc.pdf

    • Co-presented with John Bates, Adobe's Senior Product Manager - Predictive Analytics & Data Science, at the 2013 Adobe Summit on "Minority Reports Comes of Age - Predictive Audience Clustering".
    • Chris is an avid photographer and shark diver.  His work has been published in Digital Photographer, featured by the nature conservatory group such as the Grand Canyon Trust and in a resort as far away as Fiji.  Here is some of his recent work:

    http://chrismarin.com/fiji/
    http://chrismarin.com/bahamas2011/
    http://chrismarin.com/costarica2013/

  • Peter McRae, Sr. Manager, Marketing Technology Development, Symantec Open to view Nominee Details

    If there was a digital analytics fantasy draft...Peter McRae would be my #1 pick each and every time. He is the perfect example of the digital marketing, digital analyst, marketing technologist hybrid that every organization so desperately seeks to take their programs to the next level.  

    Peter's passion for problem solving is now legendary within the walls of Symantec and beyond. In the last 4 years at Symantec he has successfully lead teams and projects focused on solving for some of Symantec's most critical business challenges and opportunities. 

    He began his career at Symantec leveraging SQL, QlikView, and Business Objects to create some of the most critical dashboards for the Symantec organization utilized by all levels of the organization to answer business questions driving millions of revenue annually that Symantec was simply not able to answer before. 

    He would then join the eCommerce optimization team and help architect and pioneer one of the most advanced enterprise testing programs in our industry. Owning nearly all aspects of the testing program from ideation,to design, to coding, to launch, to reporting, to decisioning at both a test and a program level. Some of his wins include achieving a testing velocity of over 100 tests per month globally from an initial starting point of 3-4, introducing real-time predictive modeling and personalization at scale, moving the business to making testing decisions based on customer lifetime value, and integrating voice of customer with analytics and testing. His achievements can not only be measured in millions of revenue upside, but also and more importantly in how his solutions have helped change the culture and mindset of the entire Symantec organization, helping the organization transition from a slow, fear of failure, gut driven decision making process to taking a more agile, fail fast, data driven approach to making organizational decisions which is truly priceless. 

    He is now leading the marketing technology team at Symantec which is made of developers and is focused on building out the integrated stack of analytics, advertising, and marketing technologies that will be leveraged by the entire Symantec marketing organization. 

    To be successful in all these roles, Peter has acquired a unimaginable combination of technical, analytical, and business expertise. You would be hard pressed to find another person in our industry who could write code in SQL or Javascript, master such vastly different tools like QlikView, tealeaf, Business Objects, Test & Target, and Ensighten. And also be comfortable speaking to the testing and analytics, pricing and merchandising, or technical strategy of a $2 billion ecommerce business to any level of leadership, including the Symantec board of directors (which he has done before). 

    In other organizations, you may need 5 to 10 or even 20 different people spread across 3 to 4 teams to assemble the same skill sets that Peter effectively brings to the table each and every day at Symantec.  

    In the last several years Peter has now started to share his expertise at industry events including Demystified's Accelerate, BrooksBell Click Summit, DAA Symposiums, and Ensighten Agility.  

    http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/accelerate/video.asp#mcrae.

    For all these reasons above I highly recommend Peter McRae for DAA Practitioner of the year.

  • Deepak Nair, Head of Digital Intelligence, Targeting and Optmization, US Bank Open to view Nominee Details

    Deepak Nair’s passion for web analytics came early in his career as he started his own eCommerce company. Fresh out of college, he needed to put on many hats including being the IT manager when setting up the servers, project manager for guiding a team of developers, architect for building technology tools, and web analytics manager to understand what people were doing and asking questions such as, “how can we improve the user experience from the data we are collecting?”

    As solutions like Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst became available, Deepak quickly jumped on the chance of utilizing these tools to collect the most important asset to any company, which is “Data”.   That was over 15 years ago and during his career, he has used his love for web analytics to drive change in many companies by implementing best practices and integrating different technologies to deliver one holistic solution that not only answered business questions but also helped drive the way business thinks.   

    Currently, Deepak Nair is the Head of Digital Intelligence, Targeting & Optimization groups at US Bank. His main focus was to turn around the web analytics and targeting solutions that lacked vision. The solutions needed to be taken from an early stage to a mature ecosystem. Deepak turned the organization from a web analytics focused org to an advanced analytics org which had goals of tying data from both online line and offline worlds.  The goal was to create a 360 view of a customer within the technology environment and help business partners understand the story of every marketing campaign the company does that paints a full picture of the customer interaction from start to end.  There is a saying that financial companies are behind technology companies when it comes to innovation and development. Deepak is changing that view and building US Bank as an industry leader in this space and continues to hold the bar very high in transforming data into digital intelligence that provides more value to the customer.

    View the supporting materials for Deepak Nair.

  • Jesse Nichols, North America Channel Sales Manager, Google Analytics Premium, Google Open to view Nominee Details

    Jesse Nichols has been absolutely instrumental in advancing the field of digital analytics for countless companies over the last 7 years at Google, with this year topping them all.  His influence is literally global as he has shared his deep knowledge, insight and expertise in not only the Google Analytics product, but with digital analytics at large, for individuals and companies across the world.  Jesse has a solid grasp on how to make digital measurement practical, useful, relevant and actionable, cutting through the BS.  He has spread his knowledge by teaching hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals and organizations how to effectively leverage analytics for themselves and their clients, so that both customer and organization are effectively better served.  Jesse actually understands what people need and want to get from their analytics and is brilliant at leading them on the shortest and best path to get there.  Simply put, DAA needs to recognize this man, that is all.

  • Enrico Pavan, Digital Analytics Manager, TSW Srl Open to view Nominee Details

    Enrico is one of the first digital analyst in Italy to have created a blog dedicated and, above all, to have embarked on this career. He has always proved very favorable to the evangelization of digital analytics, taking courses at the main Italian universities and major conferences held in Italy.

    He was interviewed several times in magazine dedicated to the web / digital world and has always proved willing to direct comparison is face to face or through the main social media. He is considered one of the leading gurus in Italy, especially regarding conversion rate optimization, navigation and user experience testing.

    In 2009 he participated actively in the development of ClickTale through the suggestions that were required in the blog. To date turns out to be one of the leading innovators in the field in Italy and the presence at universities, corporations, and convention is proof of this.

  • Steen Rasmussen, Senior Partner, IIH Nordic - Internet Intelligence House Open to view Nominee Details

    While digital analytics is becoming more and more integrated in modern organizations, the need for evangelists to communicate the numerous benefits are now more important than ever before. Since 2005 Steen has been evangelizing how companies can drive business value from leveraging data, by adopting analytical processes and creating data-driven business cultures. This as made him into one of Europe's leading voices within the digital analytics industry, helping a board range of organizations that together represents all vertical markets.  

    Steen is also a true fireball with a mission to change the way companies approach data, both internally and externally. His ability to enlighten clients as well as employees on taking new and innovative metrologies in use to solve complex analytical challenges, makes him an outstanding industry practitioner and pioneer within the field.  

    In the Scandinavian market Steen has help build the foundations for the digital analytics industry, by hosting industry conferences, events and social get-togethers. An example of such, is his role in facilitating (and coordinating) the Danish Web Analytics Wednesday events, which last time brought more than 300 industry practitioners together, making it the biggest digital analytics event ever hosted in Denmark.  

    His dedication to the industry is also seen with his role as the Co-Chair for the Digital Analytics Associations Certification Board, where he helps to manage and structure the certifications indicatives.  

    Why should YOU vote for Steen? Our industry needs people like Steen, who not only sees it has his obligation to help others better understand and use data, but also to help build a market which will create new jobs in the future. It is these people who help form our industry, and make sure companies also see the importance of using data to drive financial gains and empower data-driven decisions. So by voting for Steen, we'll make sure he gets the deserved recognition for all of the amazing w
    ork and contributions he has given our industry.   

    I feel honored to nominate Steen, who is also one of the reasons I enjoy working in the industry. He has learned me that no matter how hard things can be, there will always be a solution (some things just takes a bit more time).

  • Krista Seiden, Product Marketing Manager, Google Open to view Nominee Details

    Krista has done a phenomenal job providing analytics insights for her team internally at Google, as well as being a thoughtful leader in the industry externally.

  • Karandeep Singh, Head of Analytics and Insights, Digital Annexe Open to view Nominee Details

    Karandeep’s Nomination
    Let me introduce myself, I am Dr Karandeep Singh, and I head up the Analytics team at Digital Annexe; a London-based digital agency. I have a PhD in Statistics and have been working in digital marketing for over 9 years with a focus on analytics. I am putting myself forward to be nominated for the award of Practitioner of the year (Individual).

    To support my nomination, I have outlined a number of my key successes and achievements below (additional supporting documents also are attached).

    After joining Digital Annexe a few months ago I have already pushed the Analytics team forward to meet the goal of developing a team to provide a full suite of analytics services to global clients. Below are a few examples of the work I have been responsible for and have completed within the last few months at Digital Annexe, which highlight my entrepreneurial efforts to achieve this goal.

    Digital Analytics Association (DAA) Membership
    Understanding the importance of the DAA and associated corporate membership, the first step to achieve the above goal was to become a corporate member of DAA. We were thrilled to receive this membership in October 2013 as there are only a handful of independent agencies in London who are members of the DAA, and Digital Annexe is now one of them.

    Product Creation and Launch
    The next step was to create a product set to map the team’s strengths and capabilities. Keeping in mind the goal, I came up with a complete set of analytic products (services) and we formed a quick plan to develop a new section on the Digital Annexe website to highlight these new services. This can be accessed on the Digital Annexe website here: www.digitalannexe.com/analytics.

    From initial idea to launch, this new website section was completed within just three working days. These landing pages provide a basic overview of the Analytics offering from Digital Annexe. Phase 2 of the website is planned for launch at the end of February 2014. In Phase 2, there will be a vast amount of rich content available. This will include a number of analytics reporting templates (such as a social KPI report template – example attached [formulas are removed]), various checklists and other useful tools to help users better shape their analytics strategies and gain a better overall understanding on the subject of analytics. I am currently preparing a number of checklists which users can then apply during the planning stage of their analytics tools implementation. One of these checklists is attached as a sample (Web Analytics checklist).

    Google Analytics Certification
    Continuing the journey to achieve the above goal, I reorganised the team and placed people in the right positions to match their interests, skills and future expectations. With the firm knowledge that there is more to analytics than just reporting (which is what has previously formed much of the focus of the Digital Annexe Analytics team), I was able to motivate and excite the team with how we would move forward to achieve our goal. With a half-day analytics session called ‘Why Digital Analytics’ (deck attached) I was able to explain the importance of analytics with the assistance of a few additional online resources.

    Through focusing the efforts and hard work of the team all three members recently passed their Google Analytics individual certification at the first attempt - with each scoring more than 90% (certificates attached). This was a crucial achievement to set us on the path of having an established team of analytics professionals at Digital Annexe.

    DAA, Adobe Marketing Suite, Webtrends, Unica Training & Certification
    To strengthen the team further, all team members are also in preparation for the DAA Web Analyst certification program. Alongside this, each team member will be receiving training in either Adobe/Webtrends/Unica and then complete the respective certification exam so that for each of these areas we will have an in-house specialist at Digital Annexe. This will allow us to become a one-stop analytics implementation consultancy and not just purely Google-focused (as most others are in the market). We expect to have all of the above training and certifications completed by the end of June 2014.  

    Certified Partnership Status
    Becoming certified by various business partners will be the next step in cementing our status as experts in the analytics field. After completing our training and passing all of the relevant certification exams, we are aiming to become:

    • A Google Analytics Certified Partner

    • A Google Analytics Premium Authorised Reseller

    • An Omniture Certified Partner

    • A Webtrends Certified Partner

    • A Visual Website Optimiser Certified Partner

    • An Optimizely Certified Partner

    • An Unbounce Certified Partner

    Aside from the qualifications we achieve, our DAA corporate membership will also assist us in becoming strong candidates for gaining the above certifications.

    Google Analytics Training
    Analytics training is one of the key products we offer, and I have designed a vast amount of Google Analytics training material to accompany this. From February 2014, all team members will be participating in the training courses to educate prospective analytics professionals. The final version of the course structure is attached as a sample (GA Course Structure).

    Growing Current Clients
    Using analytics to grow our current clients is an integral aspect of what our Analytics team does. One such client is Mercedes Benz UK, for whom I recently proposed a large-scale conversion optimisation project (£300k+) to help them to convert more site visitors using their data and analytics in order to achieve their KPIs. The deck is attached (Conversion Optimisation for MBUK - videos are replaced with links to reduce the file size).

    Analytics Product - DA Mobi
    With a full understanding and belief that mobile traffic optimisation will the biggest thing in 2014, I am designing a mobile conversion optimisation product that will focus entirely on mobile traffic. This will provide all of the features which clients need to enable them to maximise the conversion from mobile. This project is still in its initial stages, but the attached specification sheet (DA Mobi) will provide an indication as to the routes we are travelling to achieve this. The launch is planned for June 2014 and has the potential to revolutionise the mobile marketing industry and reshape the whole concept of mobile conversion optimisation.

    Michael’s Nomination
    I would like to nominate Dr Karandeep Singh for the Practitioner of the Year Award (Individual). Dr Singh has held the position of Head of Analytics & Insights at Digital Annexe for a number of months and in that time he has shown great understanding and has demonstrated expert analytical knowledge and skills. Dr Singh has a proven passion for digital analytics, which has been revealed in his vision to establish Digital Annexe as an analytics-driven company instead of a digital agency.

    An example of this can be seen through Dr Singh’s comprehensive analytics training and team management skills which resulted in the whole team passing Google Analytics Individual certification in less than 10 days of preparation (3 members; results 90+%).

    Public Speaking
    Dr Singh is an enthusiastic public speaker in the analytics world and he has the ability to turn data into insights, and insights into business decisions. This then helps businesses to increase their overall online conversion rate and in turn increase profits.
    As a regular speaker at numerous analytics events and meet ups, Dr Singh has contributed to the following: 

     
    All of the above events are digital analytics focused. A copy of one of his presentations, entitled ‘Why Web Analytics’, from a recent conference in London is attached.

    Data Driven Actionable Insights
    Dr Singh is very skilled with numbers. However, he demonstrates an even higher level of brilliance when it comes to the information behind the numbers. After analysing the numbers to understand the actual underlying information, Dr Singh has the ability to provide not just actionable insights, but assistance in making wider business decisions. Below are a few examples which I wish to highlight as evidence of this.

    • Free Boiler Consultation Service

    Whilst in his position at Homeserve, Dr Singh was responsible for all UK digital analytics not only for Homeserve but also for all affinity partners (which included most of the UK’s water und utility companies). After scrutinising the web data - (keywords searches, paid queries, comments on blogs, form queries) and combining this with call centre ‘enquiries’ data, Dr Singh produced a very simple but strong business plan offering a Free Boiler Consultation Service (Free Gas Service Consultation). This idea was well received by senior management and the Product Planning department is looking at the various logistics before launching it in UK.

    • Voucher/Offer campaigns

    After researching what users had searched for prior to purchasing Homeserve’s products and what users were talking about on various social channels, Dr Singh presented the idea of ‘Voucher propositions’. From this, Homeserve launched a series of discount voucher campaigns throughout the year on various digital channels which all yielded great success by lifting online conversion by an impressive 300% during the winter season. The below links provide supporting material for this:

    • Digital Customer Engagement

    In 2010 the FSA (Financial Services Authority) ruled that Homeserve had been mis-selling products and services. This resulted in negative feelings towards the brand as people started sharing their bad claims experiences on social channels. After careful social data analysis, including customer interactions, using analytical tools and combining complaints data (online), Dr Singh suggested that Homeserve should combat the negativity by implementing a real-time review and customer testimonials platform (similar to Reevoo/Bazaar voice).

    Working in partnership with everyone from SLTs to call centres, Dr Singh implemented Reevoo to show, not just positive, but inspirational product reviews and customer claims experiences. Once implemented, he was able to provide further evidence that more than 71% of online customers looked at Reevoo reviews for various products before making purchase decisions. One of the initial decks used at the inception stage for this project is attached.

    • Online Sales Data Analysis and Process Audit

    Selling insurance products online is always challenging, especially in the utilities market; but capturing the correct online sales data is an even bigger challenge. Dr Singh carefully looked at various external (Google Analytics/SiteCatalyst) and internal reporting tools, and through these he was able to analyse the previous year's log files in order to carry out an extensive audit to help in capturing correct numbers (generated by online sales) for Homeserve. It was an extensive task and required a deep attention to detail to map out the figures from pre-transaction to post transaction stages; from cancelled to accepted stages, and finally to work out the various anomalies in tagging/tracking product and ecommerce pages.

    Using his technical and numbers background, Dr Singh sorted the corporate sales numbers and finally streamlined the digital sales reporting process. Attached is one of the dashboard he put together after sorting out the issues related online sales (figures are hypothetical).

    Ivan’s Nomination
    I want to nominate Dr Karandeep Singh for the DAA’s Practitioner of the Year (Individual) Award. I have had the pleasure of working with Dr Singh for some time now and have experienced his impressive knowledge of implementing analytics tools up close. Dr Singh’s attention to detail is unrivalled and he has been a real inspiration to all of us on the Analytics team since he has joined Digital Annexe.

    Dr Singh worked with financial services firm, Homeserve (his previous employer), in auditing their Google Analytics and implementing Google Tag Manager. Attached is the Solution document which he helped his team at Homeserve to produce. This is just one out of many examples where Dr Singh has demonstrated his brilliancy to carry out a difficult project and generate successful results.

    I am also an avid reader of the analytics-focused blog that Dr Singh has recently started too: www.analyticsunlocked.com

    Amit’s Nomination
    Let me put forward Dr Karandeep Singh as one of the nominees for the prestigious Practitioner of the Year Award (Individual) from DAA. He is a talented team lead at Digital Annexe, a full-service digital agency based in London. Dr Singh has an excellent understanding of digital analytics and of how data can be used for optimising conversion.

    Dr Singh’s deep understanding of various conversion optimisation tools tactics, such as A/B - MV testing, has resulted in huge conversion uplift and bounce rate reduction. His understanding of analytics data has always helped no matter if it’s for a home page, product page or even purchase funnel. I am attaching a deck of some of the examples that show the results along with a testing document which he produced to record the tests and respective results. 

    Dr Singh is definitely a well deserving candidate for the award as he really is a very talented and inspiring Digital Analytics Practitioner.

    Jennifer’s Nomination
    Dr Karandeep Singh is a deserving candidate for the Practitioner of the Year Award (Individual). Since his joining at Digital Annexe, the Analytics team (for which he is responsible) has become more focused and vibrant. Being a senior member the company, I appreciate all of the hard work Dr Singh is putting in to get ourselves out in the market as a specialist team of talented professionals. Very recently we have seen the first result where his whole team passed Google Analytics exam with good scores.

    Dr Singh has a clear vision of how he will grow the analytics side of the business and what need to be done to achieve this. I am attaching the file (DA Analytics 2014) for further reference as to Dr Singh’s initial plans to reach this goal. Renaming the Analytics team to the ‘Data Squad’ was very original, and represents what they do on day to day basis and their overall aim of ‘Optimising ROI Using Analytics’.

    View the supporting materials for Dr. Singh

  • Daniel Stubbs, Conde Nast, Director, Digital Analytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Since joining Conde Nast in 2011 as the Director of Digital Analytics, Daniel Stubbs has worked on a number of strategic projects leading the company’s audience development efforts, improving digital ad campaign response and socializing the concept of High Value Audiences. Daniel understands the principles of data strategy are key to brand-building. He knows how to effectively identify key audience segments, understand audience preferences and measure response to different stimuli so Conde Nast can design an experience that fulfills the reader's needs while fulfilling company goals. Daniel and his team have been involved in a variety of cutting-edge campaigns in 2013 that brought smiles to executives' faces and are just the beginning of amazing things to come from Daniel. 2013 highlights include:

    Boosted social traffic by 50%+ for several brands by understanding how Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm responded to our posting tactics.

    Doubled the audience that uses recirculation modules through rigorous testing programs for several brands.

    Built a scenario planning tool that helped direct several million dollars in internal investment. The tool allows the user to model out how investments into edit resources, technology projects or marketing campaigns will impact site traffic.

    View the supporting material for Daniel Stubbs.

  • David Underwood, President, TopSpot Internet Marketing Open to view Nominee Details

    In 2003, David Underwood and his co-workers founded TopSpot Internet Marketing, an internet marketing agency with a focus on B2B/industrial companies and using metrics to drive strategy. It's paid off - the company is now in its 11th year and has blossomed with their focus on tracking.  

    David himself was quite active in 2013, presenting at several events:  B2B Search Marketing Strategies - Breakfast with Google in Chicago PMA (Precision Metalforming Association) Marketing and Sales Committee Conference in Cincinnati Search Marketing Seminar with Google in Houston Houston Interactive Strategies Conference - Marketing in a Multiscreen World Michigan Manufacturers Association Search Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers.

    He speaks to companies about tracking implementation, form captures, offline call tracking and determining the value of a customer via data.  

    Due to its success and transparent practices, TopSpot was one of a handful of companies to be named a Google AdWords Premier SMB Partner upon induction of the program in 2011. In 2013, David was invited to join Google’s Partner Executive Committee. 

  • Morgan Vawter, VP, Analytics & Optimization, Piston Open to view Nominee Details
    • Google Analytics Certified Partner, Premium Certified ReSeller, and Google Tag Manager Partner, bringing the possibilities of Google Analytics to a new set of clients.
    • Repeated speaker at Ad Tech, SES and other industry conferences.
    • Bringing insightful data, affecting  change at Cars.com, Oakley, Sunglass Hut, Portico Club, Bare Escentuals, and more.
    • Delivering improved conversion rates and user experiences, using tools like Certona, Adobe Test and Target, Optimost and other vendors.
    • Developing innovative tools like the AOV and RPV testing calculator.
    • Respected and endeared by clients and colleagues.
  • Sasha Verbitsky, Digital Analytics & Testing Director, Abercrombie & Fitch Open to view Nominee Details

    Over the last two years, Sasha built one of the top in class Digital Analytics practices at Abercrombie & Fitch. From “ground zero” state of no dedicated resources and out of the box, unaudited SiteCatalyst implementation and no data warehouse, A&F Analytics rapidly evolved and matured.

    Sasha built a strong team, covering Digital Analytics, Implementation, Testing & Optimization, and Customer Analytics.  A&F now has a mature, robust, well-documented multi-brand, multi-site, multi-platform (with separate Mobile sites and native apps) implementation. They compiled an excellent analytics tool kit that now includes VOC, advanced & predictive analytics, TMS, in page analytics, session replay, multiple social analytics and sentiment tools, testing platform and program in addition to the core web analytics platforms, with most pieces integrated in the last year. Most of this data, including click stream, is consolidated in the data warehouse and A&F now mines for “customer” and “life time” level insights across multiple channels. In addition to technology and people, A&F Analytics put in place data governance and analytics delivery process to support and measure various business processes and decisions. This combination of people, tech, and process enables A&F Analytics team to fully support and power rapid growth of ecommerce business by delivering numerous high value “golden nuggets” of insights, activating multiple marketing programs and initiatives, testing and enhancing many features on the site and parts of user experience.

    Outside of A&F, Sasha regularly attends (and have spoken at) Columbus WAW events and various local “analytics industry nights” and educational events (OSU; Fisher business school), where he shares industry insights and best practices with colleagues and students.

  • Matthew Zaute, Director, Analytics, Rise Interactive Open to view Nominee Details

    Matthew Zaute should be selected as a DAA Practitioner of the Year because of his relentless commitment to making his team better and producing outstanding results for his clients. He has more than 14 years of analytical experience and is currently the Director of Analytics at Rise Interactive, a digital marketing agency that specializes in media mix optimization and marketing intelligence.  

    Matthew manages a team of ten and helps them strategize the best possible ways to execute for clients. He encourages each clients to approach their marketing analysis from the perspective of answering questions. His analytics practice is adept at mining large amounts of data and is focused on ensuring that insights are impactful and actionable for Rise’s clients.

    His analytics team’s core competencies include: attribution, competitive intelligence, testing & optimization, platform audit & implementation, and custom reporting & insights. They are responsible for creating custom reporting for clients with an exceptional level of detail and accuracy.  His analytics team focuses on assessing the competitive environment and then exceeds the industry standards. For example, when testing for statistical significance, Matthew requires that he and his team find a 95% confidence interval versus the industry standard of 90%. He also uses a blend of testing methods including the scientific method, chi-squared testing, and T-tests to ensure his clients truly benefit from these testing efforts and that conclusions are based on appropriate analyses. He’s helped his team identify problems which led to several proprietary reporting tools. These tools include a scenario analysis/predictive model to help clients assess the tradeoffs between allocating budget to different channels, branded and non-branded keywords, and several other considerations. Attribution is employed for clients using a blend of rules-based and data-based attribution models depending on client sophistication and resources. 

    By leveraging these increased requirements across all services, the team is able to provide clients with actionable recommendations. Matthew strives to have his team be strategic advisors to their clients, providing services and recommendations with the express purpose of improving marketing and business performance. Matthew has been able to grow the analytics portion of the business for Rise Interactive over 300% in two years. And as Director, he’s placed a special emphasis on continuing education for the ten employees that he oversees. Each employee is GAIQ certified and they frequently attend industry conferences to stay on top of and ahead of industry trends.     

    Matthew has also shared his expertise in digital analytics with the broader community. He regularly speaks at local and national conferences, including Conversion Conference, iStrategy, and the National Center for Data Driven Marketers. He guided Rise to achieve numerous analytics credentials and certifications. Chief among them are Adobe Certified Expert (ACE), Adobe Business Partner and Google Analytics Certified Partner (one of only about 65 companies in North America).  

    When he’s not producing remarkable returns for his clients, Matthew is running marathons, enjoying time with his son, and volunteering at St. Benedicts Parish and the Chicago Public Schools Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs. Matthew has completed 14 marathons, including being a Nike pacer in the 2011, 2012, and 2013 Chicago Marathons. He volunteers with the Chicago chapter of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) as a fundraiser and has increased contributions by 40% since he began in 2012. Matthew graduated with distinction from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. 

    Matthew Zaute is an excellent, well-rounded candidate that’s continually representing the analytics industry with poise and purpose. We proudly encourage you to consider him as DAA’s Practitioner of the Year!

Most Influential Industry Contributor (Individual)

  • Matthias Bettag, Consultant, Digital Analytics Consultant (self) Open to view Nominee Details

    Matthias has been promoting digital analytics in Germany and the EU for years. He is a Certified Web Analyst and the DAA's Country Manager for Germany.

    Matthias started speaking at the eMetrics Summit back when he was a digital analytics advocate at Bayer HealthCare and remained a staunch supported during his consultancy at Semphonic (sold to Ernst & Young). He is an online tutor for the UBC/DAA courses and has spent the past year as an independent consultant.

    Matthias created the Digital Analytics Association Wikipedia page in German http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Analytics_Association, has been very involved with International Conference on Online Media Measurement http://i-com.org/ and has been working with Mind Your Privacy in Spain http://www.mindyourprivacy.com/

    Currently, Matthias is raising visibility for digital analytics in Germany by promoting DAALAs in Germany (Digital Analytics Association Late Afternoons, running on a monthly base in Berlin and other cities) which is a cross between a Web Analytics Wednesday and a Symposium. https://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/newsletter201206#daalocal, https://www.xing.com/net/pri2fdd05x/daala/

    Matthias is also very involved with helping Hamburg@Work http://www.hamburg-media.net/groups-digitalanalytics/ create a new, digital analytics working group to foster the German #measure community. 

    Matthias is Co-Chair of the eMetrics Summit in Germany, http://emetrics-summit.de/ is the Chair of the DA-Hub http://digitalanalyticshub.com/ (previously called X-Change Europe) and has been tireless in bringing the word about digital analytics to Germany.

    http://de.linkedin.com/in/mbettag
    https://twitter.com/MatthiasBettag

  • Justin Cutroni, Analytics Evangelist, Google Open to view Nominee Details

    Justin is an integral part of the digital analytics space. Even prior to joining as the Analytics Evangelist at Google, Justin was considered a leading expert in leveraging (and pushing!) Google Analytics to deliver maximum value. Since joining Google, Justin and his team have continued to develop the product to one of two leading solutions in the industry. Justin also helped lead the effort to launch Analytics Academy - an online learning portal for digital analytics and Google Analytics. With 145,000+ students, in 170 countries, it helped build skills in an industry that needs more workers. If you are in the analytics industry and have a Google Analytics question, you know to check Justin's blog even before the Google Analytics help section. In addition, Justin is a frequent speaker at industry events in the United States and around the world and a champion for our industry.

  • Larry Freed, President & CEO, ForeSee Open to view Nominee Details

    Larry Freed is viewed as the preeminent thought leader in customer analytics. In addition to leading ForeSee – a highly successful predictive analytics company whose methodology supports the decisions of 60 of the top 100 retailers, 200 government agencies and departments, six of the top 10 banks and more – Larry last year published his second industry-changing book, “Innovating Analytics – How The Next Generation of Net Promoter Can Increase Sales and Drive Business Results.”  

    The book illustrates how, as president and CEO of ForeSee, he is leading the industry charge in reforming the most important component of doing business in today’s rapidly evolving customer-centric ecosystem by focusing on the customer experience, as it needs to be considered today. His book makes a convincing case for a new standard of measuring customer satisfaction: ForeSee’s latest innovation, the Word-of-Mouth-Index℠ (WoMI℠): The Next Generation Net Promoter Score (NPS®). The book details how WoMI dramatically evolves the long-used NPS and builds a new foundation upon which organizations can best understand customers. After 18 months of testing with more than 300 companies, ForeSee’s research showed that the decade-old NPS overstated word-of-mouth detractors by an average of 270%. The research further demonstrated that WoMI accurately captures the voices of passive and active promoters and detractors to give organizations a complete picture of what customers are saying, rather than relying on an incomplete view with NPS. 

    In short, while under Larry stewardship, ForeSee has created a predictive analytic methodology that is geared towards elevating greater customer satisfaction to achieve business success. ForeSee’s analytics show organizations whether individual channels are supporting purchases, triggering purchases or even undermining strategies in other channels. The result of these insights gives organizations a complete picture of today’s information-driven, multi-channel and multi-device consumer.  

    Aside from WoMI, Larry last year oversaw the introduction of several other influential product solutions aimed at assisting organizations with the precise and reliable measurement of customer satisfaction in order to compete in today’s multi-device, multichannel world.  

    In October, Larry shepherded the introduction of the ForeSee® cx360℠ platform, a multichannel customer experience analytics platform that provides cutting-edge capabilities that help executives improve business results. The cx360℠ platform is powered by precise voice-of-customer measurement, predictive analytics, and ForeSee’s proprietary methodology.  

    Earlier in 2013, to help organizations capitalize on the growth of the mobile channel, ForeSee introduced, under Larry’s leadership, cx Replay for Mobile as the first software-as-a-service solution that visually demonstrates how consumers engage on mobile sites and apps – helping companies improve their mobile customer experience. It brings visitor feedback to life with video replay of real mobile sessions so organizations can rapidly identify and resolve issues.  

    Larry’s industry influence can be further seen in his first book: “Managing Forward: How to Move from Measuring the Past to Measuring the Future.” The book offers Larry’s views on how organizations can use forward-looking customer experience analytics to predict customer behavior to build loyalty, recommendations and financial success. 

    In 2013 Larry clearly demonstrated his unique understanding of the changing nature of the consumer landscape and recognition that businesses require a reliable method to measure the multichannel customer experience. His leadership of ForeSee in the customer analytics industry makes Larry an ideal candidate for the Digital Analytics Association’s Most Influential Industry Contributor award.
    Supporting URLs:

    View the supporting materials for Larry Freed.

  • Lee Isensee, Director, Localytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Lee has been an integral part of the digital analytics industry for almost 20 years. He has been critical in shaping digital analytics products and capabilities from his early days at Sane Solutions, to Unica, IBM and now Localytics. He has been a long-time advocate (since even before it was "cool"!) for a holistic customer picture, integrated data and flexible data architecture to allow even the most complex custom analyses.
    In addition to his involvement in product roadmaps for some of the biggest digital analytics products in the world, he has spent over 10 years in a direct client-facing consulting role, helping Fortune 500 companies drive success with with digital data. He has a rare experience set, ranging from detailed technical understanding to a broader strategic view of the bigger picture, and a keen sense of how technical and strategic work together for success.  

    Lee is a keen contributor to the digital analytics industry and shares his knowledge via speaking, webinars, blog posts and social media. He served as Co-Chair of the DAA Membership Committee for two years, played an integral role in defining DAA Standards and the new W3C Customer Experience Data Layer and has been involved in planning DAA Symposiums.

    Lee is truly committed to pushing the boundaries of analytics and growing both our industry and the results it can drive for businesses.

  • Jesse Nichols, Channel Sales Manager, North America, Google Analytics Premium, Google Open to view Nominee Details

    If one person had single-handedly inspired hundreds of Digital Analytics consultancies around the world to raise the bar in service excellence and delivery of value to clients from Digital Analytics investments, I believe they would be deserving of this award.  Indeed, this person exists and his name is Jesse Nichols.  Hear me out on the case for this... 

    Jesse Nichols has championed the Google Analytics Certified Partner network for several years and, most recently, focuses on supporting Google Analytics Premium Resellers.  I've been part of the GA Certified Partner network since it’s beginning.  Over those years, I've seen many partner managers in the role, and seen how the GA partner network has grown, changed, and influenced the industry as a whole.  Given this perspective, I strongly believe that Jesse's leadership of the GACP network and the positive influence he has had on the Digital Analytics industry constitutes one of the single most influential people ever.  

    While Jesse's influence hasn't been as visible as that of industry rock-stars who write books, blog, and speak world-wide, Jesse has *influenced* hundreds of companies, cumulatively thousands of analysts, and tens of thousands of companies to use digital analytics more effectively.  That's a pretty influential role to play and is why I believe Jesse is well deserving of this award. 

    As for supporting materials, Jesse has spoken at many-a-conference over the years, but I think the most notable and visible supporting material is the legacy present in Google Analytics and the GACP program to date, and, in proportionally small part (certainly Jesse is in no way single-handedly responsible for this), the breadth of adoption of Google Analytics, which speaks for itself.  Thanks for consideration!

  • Judah Phillips. Analytics Executive, Author, Advisor Open to view Nominee Details

    Judah continues to create, define, and evolve the Digital Analytics industry. In 2013 he published two books on analytics:  Building a Digital Analytics Organization and Digital Analytics Primer.  He also spoke at several events and helped out with the planning and execution of all Boston Local Chapter DAA events. He lectured on analytics at Boston College and Northeastern University.

    Beyond always supporting the local, national, and international analytics community, he also received kind praise for his books from industry luminaries, practitioners across agencies, vendors, and brands including founders of the DAA itself. See below.

    ***Building a Digital Analytics Organization: 

    "The allure of Big Data is immense. There is SO MUCH DATA! Yet, data collection does nothing by itself. It actually does financial harm left in the wrong hands. Fix that, and you win. Let Judah show you how to build an organization where Big Data's primary imperative is to drive Big Action." 
    --Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

    "A rigorous, professional approach to digital analytics requires the types of management approaches that are laid out in this book... Judah Phillips has been an advocate of these serious disciplines for a long time, but now the world is ready to adopt them--and the book comes along just in time... and this one is distinctive in a number of ways and brings into the digital analytics space a sophistication in both data management and data analysis that is not often found...." 
    --Thomas H. Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work, professor at Harvard Business School and Babson College, and cofounder of the International Institute for Analytics

    “The full strengths of an approach that is both practical and intellectual... You’ll find plenty of real insight here, not just into how to do digital analytics, but also how to get digital analytics done. That’s a distinction that’s hard to appreciate until you’ve walked the walk, not just talked the talk.”  
    --Gary Angel , Partner, Ernst & Young, Digital Analytics Center of Excellence

    "Without a digital analytics organization you aren't optimizing your business, your site or your app. Reading this book can help you.  I just hope you adapt before one of your competitors does." 
    --Bryan Eisenberg, author of Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, and Always Be Testing, Keynote Speaker, Cofounder of the Digital Analytics Association, and Publisher of UseTheData

    "Since founding Gomez 15 years ago, I've had the privilege of working with many pioneers in the field of web site and e-commerce excellence. I am impressed with the managerial principles and analytical techniques Judah has developed and presented in this book. A must read for the 21st century analyst and executive who wants to learn how to create value and deliver excellence with digital analytics." 
    --Julio Gomez, Founder of Gomez, Inc., General Manager at Attivio

    "Before 'Big Data' and 'Data Science' became buzz words, Judah was extracting actionable insights from immense data sets and revolutionizing the field of business analytics. Unfortunately, the digital version of his nerdy brain is still too big for a download, so reading and internalizing this book is the second best option for anyone interested in improving their business via an intelligent approach to data and analytics." 
    --Yaakov Kimelfeld, Ph.D., Chief Research Officer of Compete

    "Among the most valuable things you'll find in Judah's book is his experience. Building a Digital Analytics Organization is packed with real-life guidance and wisdom from his years of work as a practitioner and manager in the analytics field. From defining measurement needs, to analyzing data, to comparing analytics tools, Judah has done just about everything. We can all put his experience to use as a guide as we build out our own analytics organizations." 
    --Justin Cutroni, author of Google Analytics, Analytics Evangelist at Google.

    "Competing online today demands competency around measuring and optimizing customer behavior, and this useful book takes a practical look at the latest practices for digital analytics and data science."  
    --Eric J. Hansen, CEO of SiteSpect

    "Judah writes about enterprise analytics from a deep operational understanding, rather than from solely a research perspective. His erudite observations are both unique and most valuable to those building new or evolving an existing data-driven organization. A must read."
    --Rand Schulman, Cofounder of Digital Analytics Association, Managing Partner of Efectyv Digital, pioneer in digital marketing and new media

    "This excellent book is a practical guide to help business practitioners make better decisions based on digital analytics. There couldn't be a better time for this book as data-driven decision making is a core skill for successful business executives, managers and practitioners alike." 
    --Raj Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Localytics

    "In this book Judah provides a clear and compelling explanation of the power of digital analytics. This book is a great read for everyone seeking to harness digital data intelligence and maximize its business value." 
    --Jean Paul Isson, co-author of Win with Advance Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data, Global Vice President Predictive Analytics & BI at Monster Worldwide, Inc.

    "Judah Phillips delivers an enlightening and practical guide to building your digital analytics organization that will help any reader drive more value from their analytics." 
    --Larry Freed, CEO of Foresee Results, author of Managing Forward: How to Move from Measuring the Past to Managing the Future

    "Every organization today needs to be data-driven. Judah has been at the forefront of the digital analytics discipline for many years, and one of his primary strengths is his ability to communicate technology requirements to the business in a way that's actionable. This book should become an essential part of every digital marketer's toolkit." 
    --Andrew Edwards, Cofounder of the Digital Analytics Association, Managing Partner of Efectyv Digital  

    ***Digital Analytics Primer: 

    “The full strengths of an approach that is both practical and intellectual... You’ll find plenty of real insight here, not just into how to do digital analytics, but also how to get digital analytics done. That’s a distinction that’s hard to appreciate until you’ve walked the walk, not just talked the talk.”
    —Gary Angel, Partner, Ernst & Young, Digital Analytics Center of Excellence 

    “This is the primer for the modern-day digital marketing practitioner. This book offers practical information on how to develop a process for data collection, reporting, and dashboarding in order to extract actionable insights from large data sets. Judah draws on his experience as practitioner and as an executive to offer real-world advice and guidance on how to win with digital analytics. This is a must-read for anyone working in the analytics field.”
    —Jonathan Corbin, Manager, Finance and Insurance, Adobe 

    “If you are new to the world of digital analytics, or just need a refresher, I can think of no better place to start than Judah Phillips’ Digital Analytics Primer. This e-book presents a comprehensive look at the strategies, tactics, and terminology of data-driven businesses and ‘big data.’ It’s definitely recommended reading for today’s digital marketers.”
    —Kim Ann King, Chief Marketing Officer, SiteSpect, Inc. 

    “Whether you’re an engineer, entrepreneur, manager, or business analyst, this book brings you up to speed on the latest concepts from data science and statistics, and how each is put into practice in a data-driven business. A must-read for anyone attempting to modernize their business operations and increase value from data and analytics.”
    —Kurt Gray, Director, Analytics Platform, Nokia/Microsoft

  • Christopher Reynolds, Vice President, Data & Marketing Analytics, Condé Nast  Open to view Nominee Details

    Christopher Reynolds is vice president of data and marketing analytics at Condé Nast, home to some of the world’s most celebrated media brands. Christopher leads a team of 40+ research experts, digital analysts, and database managers who strive to provide the premier brands of Condé Nast and their advertising clients with the most accurate and actionable insight on consumer behaviors across all media.  

    In his earlier years, Christopher put his analytics prowess to work leading Kraft’s international web analytics strategy and execution for more than 100 brand websites. He defined the marketing strategy, including search and display media buying, for kraftfoods.com (now kraftrecipes.com), a top online recipe destination and the largest CPG marketer-owned content website. He also led the strategy for monetization of the Kraft CRM program, which included online and email ad sales, syndication, and strategic partnerships.  

    Christopher is an active industry influencer and is regularly engaged in various speaking opportunities at top analytics conferences and industry events. He has received many accolades for his unique contributions, and in October 2013 was honored by ‘The FOLIO: 100’ as one of the most innovative professionals in magazine media. Christopher has also been named Adobe Marketer of the Month, has recognized by his own company as the 2011 Condé Nast Corporate Person of the Year for Research & Insights, and recently as a 2013 Condé Nast Collaborator of the Year. He has also served on several leadership committees, including the Association of Magazine Media, Interactive Advertising Bureau, Online Publishers Association, Media Ratings Council, American Association of Advertising Agencies and Advertising Research Foundation.  

    Upon his arrival at Condé Nast, Christopher led the magazine industry in the development of the framework for the measurement of digital editions of magazines on tablet and mobile devices. This framework was eventually adopted across the publishing industry and paved the way for the measurement standards developed and promoted by the Association of Magazine Media.

    Most recently, and perhaps most notably, Christopher developed the data strategy behind Condé Nast Catalyst: Audience by Design—an audience segmentation and profiling strategy for enhanced monetization across the Condé Nast digital network. This new product exceeded revenue expectations in its first year and has transformed the way the company engages clients by matching Condé Nast’s affluent and influential audiences with brand advertisers to reach consumer types like high-spending moms and highly social singles. While audience segmentation by publishers isn’t new, Condé Nast’s segments are distinctive in their level of sophistication, allowing extraction of consumer insights from its network of 450,000 "preferred subscribers" to better segment the 55 million subscribers of titles like Vogue and GQ. Understanding how to implement and fully leverage the advanced analytics technology that provides highly qualified audience segments is what has set Christopher apart and put his career trajectory on hyperdrive. It’s fair to expect amazing things from Christopher in the future.

    View the supporting material for Christopher Reynolds.

  • Slavi Samardzija, Chief Analytics Officer, Wunderman and KBM Group Open to view Nominee Details

    Slavi Samardzija's entrepreneurial spirit and quest for innovative excellence inspires both colleagues and clients alike. Under his leadership and tutelage, his team at Wunderman and KBM Group has developed proprietary, cutting-edge technologies for clients, most recently Listening Platform, Decision Track, Test Lab and BrandSnap (please see supporting materials). 

    As a true influential industry contributor, Slavi is always willing to share his knowledge and time. He is a frequent speaker at industry events, including Integrated Marketing Week 2013, DMA Annual Conference 2012 and 2011, and the Adobe Sales Kick-off, December 2013. He has been published and quoted in Ad Age, DM News, BtoB Magazine, Target Marketing, eMarketing and Commerce, and WPP’s Atticus Journal. 

    In 2013 Slavi was named a “Rising Star” by the Marketing Edge (formerly the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation) and also was named one of DMNews “40 Under 40” award winners for being a “marketing luminary.” For his contribution to his company and his clients, Slavi has received internal company recognitions and awards, most notably WPP’s 2008 Atticus Merit for original thinking in Digital Communications.  

    Slavi has worked with numerous interns over the years as both a teacher and mentor. He established internship programs with both Columbia University in New York City and University of Texas at Dallas, where he sits on the Marketing Analytics Advisory Board for the UTD School of Management. In this capacity he provides assistance with the program design and continually monitors the course work to ensure the curriculum is both relevant to commercial enterprises and generates future industry leaders with successful career paths. Slavi and his team frequently visit university campuses to engage with faculty and administration in order to drive continual interest and excitement for our industry.

    View the supporting materials for Slavi Samardzija.

  • Viswanath "Sri" Srikanth, Strategy Architect, Big Data and Analytics, IBM Open to view Nominee Details

    "Sri" has been a quiet force behind the scenes in what will eventually be one of the most far-reaching shifts in our industry. His work in founding and chairing the W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Standard group (http://www.w3.org/community/custexpdata) has been instrumental in turning what was long an aspirational idea into reality: standardizing the collection and analysis of digital visitor and customer data for business users of all kinds. 

    Since announcing the project, recruiting vendor partners and outlining the goals, as chairman, Sri has been a singular force of leadership to advance this often-tedious and thankless task of synthesizing different viewpoints and ideas into a mutually acceptable and cohesive standard which could ultimately revolutionize how digital data is collected, shared and analyzed. All of the participating firms and individuals deserve credit, but Sri in particular has been an essential element of this valuable step forward for the #measure community.

    Sri demonstrated outstanding initiative and leadership in driving the W3C initiative related to the Customer Experience Digital Data Layer open standard.  Sri developed the concept for this standard after learning more about IBM Digital Analytics and the nature of javascript tagging in general.  He had to recruit and bring together a wide group of vendors and customers to refine and drive the initiative through the W3C process and did so successfully.

  • Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate at Google Open to view Nominee Details

    Daniel is a veteran in the Analytics industry, to which he has contributed lots of content and energy. He started his career as a practitioner, then became a consultant, and recently joined Google as an Analytics Advocate, which demonstrates his constant push on analytics innovation and usage. He also served as the Co-Chair of Marketing of the Web Analytics Association (now DAA) for almost 4 years and received the 2010 Web Analytics Association Presidential Award.

    He has contributed over a hundred articles to major online publications such as the official Google Analytics blog, Econsultancy, Search Engine Land and Smashing Magazine. Last, and maybe most importantly, Daniel is the Founder and Editor of online-behavior.com, a renowned portal that deals with everything analytics. You can learn more about his contributions to the Analytics industry at danielwaisberg.com

  • Caleb Whitmore, Founder & CEO, Analytics Pros Open to view Nominee Details

    Caleb has worked with Google Analytics sine it was Urchin and has been a Digital Analytics industry influencer via his book writing, blogs, consistent speaking engagements and innovation in the field of Digital Analytics. While printed screenshots aren't timeless , the content rains relevant in the book he co-wrote with Justin Cutroni and Sebastian Tonkin, one of the best and most practical books on GA available: Performance Marketing with Google Analytics (Wiley, 2010). Caleb has been active in he digital world since 1999, previously directed the search & Analytics team at the agency POP, and most recently founded Analytics Pros in 2009, leading it to to become the #1 Google Analytics Premium Reseller in the world, not to mention serving many internationally recognized brands and organizations. He has done this by being continually innovative in our digital analytics field, including planning and implementation strategies, and approaches customized for each client's success. His company consistently engenders a sincerely customer-centric approach with deep care, respect and fun at the same time. He also makes Analytics Pros consistently one of the most enjoyable companies to work at for his employees. I honestly think it is high time that Caleb is recognized for his contribution and being a shaper of our industry.

  • Chris Zakharoff, Marketect, Ensighten Open to view Nominee Details

    Chris Zakharoff is probably the most influential person in our industry that the mainstream anaytics community has never heard of. What makes Chris so influential and what sets him apart, is that while most of the other nominees in this category share high level concepts and strategies, Chris provides recommendations that is supported by working code. Code that solves enterprise optimization problems and enable new optimization capabilities. 

    Within the mature Fortune 500 enterprise optimization programs, there is a good chance that they are likely leveraging some of Chris recommendations, if not his actual hand written code. The same could be said regarding many testing platforms (he practically re-wrote Adobe Target), and optimization consulting firms big and small. 

    Whether you need to integrate, augment, or extend your testing platform and capabilities, Chris can likely identify the right solution and write the code to get it done.  

    I personally know dozens of enterprise optimization program leaders who speak with extreme admiration and respect for the quality and impact of the work Chris has done and how he has truly advanced our optimization industry more than any list of testing best practices or blog post of what to test first on a shopping cart. For those of us experienced in the field, we recognize that what Chris brings to our industry is far more valuable. 

    I hope that all the veteran optimization leaders in the DAA recognize Chris' work and vote for him as the most influential industry contributor in 2013.

New Technology of the Year (Group)

  • Adobe Anomaly Detection Open to view Nominee Details

    In October, 2013, Adobe launched a key feature in Adobe Analytics called Anomaly Detection. It literally helps marketers and analysts to find insights they may have never found or if an outlier was uncovered, it was likely far too late to take any meaningful action. It enables marketers and analysts to find the proverbial needle in a big data hay stack through predictive analytics to discover anomalies in their data.

    Anomaly Detection's new predictive capabilities enable marketers and data analysts to quickly uncover critical insights through automated Anomaly Detection, a powerful capability that identifies data points that fall outside of the norm based on historical trends. As the volume of cross-channel data continues to increase, these insights can easily be missed by analysts and data scientists. Anomaly Detection can be accessed from the Adobe Marketing Cloud interface of Adobe Analytics and in the new Adobe Analytics iOS App for mobile device reporting. It can also be integrated into customized marketing dashboards through open APIs.

    Anomaly detection leverages advanced algorithms to automatically discover and surface statistically relevant insights, thus empowering marketing analysts with the ability to make smarter decisions, faster than was previously possible. For trended data, anomaly detection identifies statistical anomalies-that is to say, by separating "true" signals from "noise" as data changes over time. This helps analysts unearth anom­alous behav­iors or pat­terns that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Anom­aly detec­tion transforms analysts into advanced statisticians by unearthing valuable opportunities ripe for optimization.

    Adobe sees anomaly detection as the new "starting point" for analysis, by helping marketers and analysts unearth spikes and dips that fall outside the historical norms in the range of predicted results. Hopefully, that 5,000 percent spike won't go unnoticed for weeks or months-because it's clearly not normal. However, other anom­alies that could have a significant effect on your business can easily be uncovered and then acted upon with this new capability.

    Here's a quick use case for a retailer. A common problem retail­ers face with online sales is pric­ing issues. If someone misses a zero, a $100 prod­uct may sud­denly start selling like hot­cakes at $10 each and end up sold out. That's an insight you need to know about as soon as possible, and Anomaly Detection is designed to help marketers discover these key insights quickly so they have time to act. You don't want to find out days later that you sold out of a product and your margins are terrible.

    View supporting material for Adobe Analytics Anomaly Detection.

  • Adobe Mobile Services Open to view Nominee Details

    The most intriguing technology for 2013 - which will set the stage for digital analysts (who happen to be Adobe customers) to do mobile analytics, digital testing, and explore in mobile targeting with 1st and 3rd party data sources - is Adobe Mobile Services.

    Adobe Mobile Services was released in late 2013, providing a ready made template for mobile analytics, as well as an innovative implementation (SDK) that also incorporates digital testing (Adobe Target) and 1st and 3rd party sources (Adobe Audience Manager) for highly optimized targeting. Mobile Marketers can also reach mobile app users with more effective in-app marketing campaigns based on their GPS location and proximity to a point-of-interest such as a retail store, sporting event or concert venue.

    Digital marketers who are still figuring out mobile can not only wade into the space more effectively, but can also go beyond the basics of mobile to experiment with mobile optimization and also mobile-centric targeting. Digital marketers are going to continue to go "mobile first" - and having an integrated toolset such as Adobe Mobile Services should make it easy to do so.

    Supporting materials:

  • Adometry Open to view Nominee Details

    Priorities and challenges for organizations attempting to effectively reach existing and prospective customers, across multiple channels, and drive conversions. Every day advertisers face difficult choices concerning where to allocate budgets and focus resources in order to generate maximum results for the business. While the industry historically relied on inaccurate and arbitrary methodologies such as ‘last click,’ the Adometry Attribute advanced attribution and optimization platform is designed to help marketers make decisions using a data-driven methodology that identifies the campaigns, channels and creative that are working, letting organizations place smart ‘bets’ when setting marketing strategy. 

    For example, after switching from last-click to advanced attribution, LasikPlus identified that Display spending was providing an 80 percent lift in conversion rates when used in conjunction with paid search. Similarly, using Adometry’s attribution platform one of the nation’s top 10 retailers was able to assess and rank each of its publisher partners, discontinuing relationships with poor-performing traffic sources and helping the advertiser renegotiate more favorable rates using viewability and robust performance data across multiple ad networks. 

    Additionally, Adometry was also named a leader in Interactive Attribution by Forrester (2012) due to its “principled statistical attribution approach, optimization tools, and integration flexibility.” More than 70 leading advertisers and agencies currently rely on Adometry for performance marketing insights.
    Articles
    DM News: Making the Case for the Evolution of Cross-Channel Attribution
    http://www.dmnews.com/making-the-case-for-the-evolution-of-cross-channel-attribution/article/317946/
    Mobile Marketing Magazine - Attribute-able
    http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/attribut-able/
    iMediaConnection – How to cure your analytics paralysis
    http://www.dmnews.com/making-the-case-for-the-evolution-of-cross-channel-attribution/article/317946/
    Business2Community - Cross-Device Measurement: The Ad Industry’s White Whale http://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/cross-device-measurement-ad-industrys-white-whale-0675408 

    Case Studies

    Quantifying Results is Good for Business – LasikPlus
    http://www.adometry.com/assets/files/resources/uploads/case-study-lasikplus.pdf

    Top 10 Retailer Realizes Incremental Revenue Through Attribution
    http://www.adometry.com/assets/files/resources/uploads/case-study-online-retailer.pdf

  • Anametrix Open to view Nominee Details

    Anametrix is the only marketing analytics platform to combine real-time performance feedback with multichannel predictive modeling for comprehensive insights, and powerful decision support.  By collecting, analyzing and making sense out of data from virtually any source, Anametrix enables marketers to act on multichannel data to drive revenue and profitability. Our real-time dashboards present a unified view of paid, owned, and earned-media effectiveness to assess marketing effectiveness.  Our next-generation analytics platform also allows marketers to perform diagnostic analysis, drill-down segmentation and predictive modeling to improve campaign results, lower acquisition costs, drive loyalty, increase ad monetization and expand customer lifetime value.    

    In October 2013, Anametrix commercially launched Anametrix for News and Entertainment Media, specifically designed for the media vertical.  Anametrix for News and Entertainment Media takes the guesswork out of business decisions with real-time applied analytics. The cloud-based Anametrix solution can:

    • Consolidate and analyze data from print, broadcast, online, social and mobile properties.
    • Combine, real-time information with in-depth reporting and analysis, including predictive and statistical modeling.
    • Deliver in-the-moment analytics on your readers, viewers and listeners.
    • Reveal opportunities to make more advertising, premium content and subscription revenue. 

    Designed for both ease of use and flexibility, the Anametrix technology platform was built from the ground up to power a wide range of marketing analytics capabilities – from streaming data collection, web and mobile analytics, to real-time queries, segmentation, dashboards, reporting and predictive analytics.  This common platform promotes integration and consistency, differentiating Anametrix from other vendors who have developed or acquired their tools separately and attempted to cobble them together.  With a completely unified cloud –based analytics platform like Anametrix, users can combine and correlate information across myriad enterprise data sources, and leverage the power of real-time data collection.  The output is right-time results returned completely in context with accuracy and relevancy across all access layers and delivery methods.  Anametrix is the only analytics platform to natively combine real-time marketing performance feedback with multichannel predictive modeling for comprehensive insights, and powerful decision support.  

    Anametrix powers News organizations ‘editorial teams with the following:

    • What content and authors attract the most readership
    • What stories should be featured on the homepage
    • What headlines increase readership
    • What sections enjoy the longest visits and most pageviews
    • What authors engage most successfully on social media
    • When it makes sense to post a story on Facebook
    • What threshold to set to trigger a paywall subscription
    • What photo galleries attract the most views
    • Who are your most popular photographers
    • How video streaming contributes to size and types of audience and ad revenue

    Anametrix powers broadcast producers with the following:

    • How each delivery channel affects viewership
    • How the mix of traditional television, online, social and mobile affects ratings
    • What social-network engagement correlates to more viewership
    • What campaigns and promotions improve ratings
    • Which programs should be promoted on streaming video sites
    • How to justify increased ad fulfillment with advertisers
    • Whether distributing content to YouTube, Hulu and other partners improves broadcast ratings or erodes audience
    • How to use predictive modeling to forecast ratings and price advertising  

    “Anametrix has given us a flexible, multichannel analytics solution, providing powerful decision support on how our editorial and advertising is performing from moment to moment. Using Anametrix data, our editors and staff have increased page views by nearly 25 percent and audience size by 12 percent year over year, despite introduction of a paywall. We’re also more accurately stocking ad units by popularity, which drives our ad revenues.  Additionally, live-stream data from Anametrix helps us increase our effective television ratings by up to 30 percent, which has a direct influence on our broadcast revenue.”  Joseph Gordon, Director of Research, U-T San Diego

    View the supporting material for Anametrix.

  • comScore Open to view Nominee Details

    In 2013, comScore launched Digital Analytix® Multi-Platform and moved to the forefront in solving the complex technological and methodological issues associated with digital consumers shifting from screen to screen. With its multi-platform capability, Digital Analytix is able to unify users across devices and platforms using comScore’s proprietary browser unification methodology. This methodology can be applied using keys from a Digital Analytix customer’s own data as well as applied to unauthenticated datasets where browsing is anonymous by the user.  

    comScore brings a unique ability to combine panel research insights, statistical methodology and software engineering together in the Digital Analytix platform – this unique combination of capabilities helps companies to understand customer interaction and behavior across devices and channels across their own organization as well as across their industry. Additionally in 2013, comScore launched Media Metrix Multi-Platform, the multi-platform version of its industry-leading online audience measurement solution. Without sophisticated multi-platform measurement capability, analysts using legacy web analytics tools are overcounting users, undercounting engagement and miscounting conversion. 

    To develop its Digital Analytix Multi-Platform solution, comScore partnered with its customer, Virgin Media – a leading broadband media and mobile provider. Virgin Media had the challenge of unifying customer interactions across their online, mobile device and set-top box experiences. "As a media company, it would be short-sighted to focus on what our customers are doing solely on a single device," said Gianni Maestri, head of digital entertainment analytics and insight at Virgin Media. "Whether they're setting their set top box to record a favorite show from their smartphone or watching music videos on a tablet, we need to know how, when and where they're interacting with our services. Digital Analytix is the only product on the market that enables this level of insight." 

    "Knowing how our customers consume content across Virgin Media’s properties and services on various devices isn’t just nice to have – it’s critical to our business,” continued Maestri. The level of understanding Digital Analytix Multi-Platform provides us is incomparable to anything currently available on the market. Knowing where, when and how people interact with Virgin Media services gives us the insight we need to make better decisions for customers in terms of the content we provide and even how we develop our products." 

    Digital Analytix Multi-Platform is now available to comScore clients in all markets around the world.
    Supporting Material;

  • Curalate Open to view Nominee Details

    Curalate, a Philadelphia based startup, is drastically changing the face of analytics by putting images first when analyzing social networks. Using novel image recognition technologies, Curalate’s analytics and marketing platform allow brands to deeply understand how their imagery is resonating with their audience across the web. This new age of ‘visual analytics’ is allowing our clients to solve many key business challenges that traditional, text-based analytics can only approximate.  

    Humans process extreme amounts of visual information every second, making visual artifacts (e.g., images) a natural, efficient, and effective form of communication. Online social networks, coupled with the ubiquity of mobile devices and cameras, reflect this process: users are communicating with images. In the last year Pinterest and Instagram saw a larger increase in popularity than any other social network. Additionally social platforms that are traditionally text based like Facebook and Twitter grew their services in ways that feature images more prominently. Each day almost half a billion photos are shared across Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram alone. 

    Despite this, traditional analytics rely on text to measure what users are communicating, largely due to technological challenges surrounding the analysis of visual data. As a result brands are completely unaware of how much their imagery is being shared, who is engaging with their imagery, and how much their imagery is resonating with the public. Users distribute brand’s images, discuss their products, and display brand affinity entirely without the company’s knowledge. Leveraging this crowd information is vital: it indicates trends in products, be attributed for sales, and suggests which creative resonates the most with the public. No analytic solution uses the image as the core piece of information, and as a result companies that wish to quantify the impact of visual media on social engagement are at a complete loss.  

    Curalate fills the need for visual analytics through a unique blend of novel computer vision techniques and tools that bring context to images across the web. By focusing on the image, Curalate breaches a new frontier of analytics that enables companies to leverage the actual context of social media conversations to make informed business decisions. Curalate can answer questions previously untackled by other analytic technologies such as, what visual content is driving traffic, how people are interacting with different creatives, and how to maximize return on investment with image-based social media strategies.  

    Curalate’s core technology is the ability to identify perceptually identical images in enormous data sets extremely quickly. Every second, Curalate processes over 2,500 images to find it’s client’s imagery on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. As a result, Curalate can find imagery relevant to our clients even if the user makes no mention of the client’s brand. For example, often users on Pinterest will re-share a photo of a product they love without using the brands name (e.g., “I love these jeans”). Curalate can tie these photos back to the source, even across different social networks. Only through efficient, scalable computer vision technology can this association be made and an accurate measure of a brand’s reach be measured. 

    Today over 300 household brands use Curalate to measure, monitor and grow brand engagement on socially curated sites. In the past social media analytics we’re nothing more than vanity metrics, however with visual analytics Curalate has developed a set of tools that clients use to impact real business decisions. For example, various retailers have leveraged Curalate’s analytics to inform inventory and buying decisions. The data helps brands determine which images are seeing the most engagement and purchase similar products accordingly. In addition, Curalate enables brands to create unique promotions that invite users to think beyond traditional online campaigns. Beverage maker Kaluah created a promotion encouraging fans to share images of their favorite Kaluah related recipes. As a result the brand developed a deeper understanding for how their customers are actually using their product. With Curalate data in hand, brands continue to find innovative ways to reach customers.

    Supporting Information:

    Websites:

    Videos:

    Presentations:

  • Darwin Analytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Darwin Analytics is a Belgian start-up in digital analytics. They are doing a great job building a fantastic analytics tool. 

    www.darwinanalytics.com

  • Ensighten Open to view Nominee Details

    With the release of Ensighten Activate in 2013, the Ensighten Agile Marketing Platform (AMP) stands out as the most innovative and disruptive new technology of the year. 

    Every marketing organization today is facing the same challenge, how do I deliver relevant and personalized experiences in real-time anywhere and everywhere people choose to engage with my brand?  

    With the Agile Marketing Platform, Ensighten now offers the most compelling omni-channel personalization solution in our industry. With the Ensighten AMP, enterprises can finally collect, own, unify, decision, and act on all their data in real time, using any technology, across any device, at a 1:1 user level.  

    Collect all your data – Ensighten’s tag delivery network allows you to capture data across all your digital touch points, including web, email, social, display, and mobile. Quickly build robust data layers to standardize and syndicate your data across all your sites and tags. You can also automatically integrate your offline and CRM data allowing you to fully leverage and activate all your valuable marketing data in one platform. 

    Own all your data: Why constantly rent the data generated from all your paid, owned, and earned marketing activities, when you can own it. Ensighten allows you to capture your off-domain marketing activities as 1st party data to your brand.  

    Unify all your data – Transform, integrate, and stitch all your data together around user profiles. Make your data meaningful and actionable by building rich profiles of your users across sessions, channels, and devices.  

    Decision on all your data - Once you have built your rich user profiles, the Ensighten platform will also allow you to run advanced segmentation, scoring, and modeling on your profile data to identity and target the right experience for each user. 

    Real-time 1:1 action on all your data - The Ensighten platform was built for real-time action and excels at use cases that require real-time personalization of the user experience. Whether its MVT testing or data driven personalization, Ensighten can customize the user experience at a 1:1 level without sacrificing site or user performance. 

    Any technology – Ensighten gives you the freedom and flexibility to deliver and enrich any marketing technology you want. You are not locked in to any one vendor or solution so you can build your marketing technology stack with any combination of tools and vendors you prefer. 

    Any device or touchpoint –Ensighten is optimized for web, mobile, video, social, display, and much much more.  

    The Ensighten Agile Marketing Platform serves as your actionable omni-channel personalization layer driving all your marketing technologies and capabilities across your organization. From web to mobile, from optimization to personalization, from predictive to programmatic, from analytics to attribution, from acquisition to retention, enterprises can now rapidly execute, experiment, and innovate with any technology and solve for any marketing use case at enterprise scale. 

    The Ensighten Agile Marketing Platform deserves to be the technology of the year because no other technology puts as many powerful marketing capabilities into the hands of technologists, analysts, and marketers. 

    To learn more about the Ensighten Agile Marketing Platform visit: http://www.ensighten.com/platform/ensighten-activate.

  • ForeSee Open to view Nominee Details

    ForeSee’s cxReplay for Mobile is the biggest advancement in mobile visualization technology in the past year. It is the first software-as-a-service solution that provides organizations with concrete visual evidence of how their mobile channels are faring with customers. 

    Retailers that cannot deliver a quality customer experience in mobile will perish. So to help them stay alive – and thrive – ForeSee introduced cxReplay for Mobile in May 2013. The solution demonstrates how consumers engage on mobile sites and apps – offering video replay of real mobile sessions so that organizations can rapidly identify and resolve issues. 

    cxReplay for Mobile displays the taps, swipes and scrolls of an application’s real mobile visitors. This pinpoints consumers’ struggles with the app and advances necessary improvements – while identifying whether any individual struggles represent broader issues. The solution also uses satisfaction scores, visitor roles and comments to highlight relevant replays, and it shares those replays across an organization to build consensus on needed improvements.  

    These features enable companies to put themselves in mobile users’ shoes. Retailers are able to identify how well their mobile sites and apps meet their visitors’ needs, whether they are easy to navigate and whether they facilitate m-commerce or drive visitors towards the competition.  

    “For brands today, it’s not enough to simply provide customers with a mobile experience. User expectations, coupled with sophisticated technology, dictate that the experience be intuitive, adaptive and truly engaging,” said John Lovett, senior partner at Web Analytics Demystified, a leading Web analytics consulting and research company. “Customer experience solutions that provide both data and visualizations are critical to helping organizations truly gauge the success of mobile sites and apps. These technologies enable companies to hone their mobile strategies, identify and resolve struggles, and stay attuned to what’s driving visitor satisfaction. The ability to do all this with integrated, turnkey solutions that exist within a SaaS-based environment helps marketing professionals free up time for other customer-centric priorities.
    Supporting URLs:

    View the supporting materials from ForeSee.

  • Localytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Localytics is a fast-growing startup that has taken the mobile analytics and marketing industry by storm. Their analytics solution is a dedicated, mobile-first solution that tackles analytics from a mobile-needs perspective, rather than simply applying traditional (and sometimes ill-fitting) web concepts to mobile.  

    With already the most robust mobile and web analytics solution, Localytics took over the app marketing world in 2013 by creating the first marketing platform which includes Push Messaging, In-App Messaging, and A/B testing. These solutions have rewritten how many organizations communicate with users across mobile and web.

    More recently, they have developed a sophisticated, targeted marketing and messaging platform that allows clients to provide data-driven, personalized messaging via complete integration of their marketing and analytics solutions.  

    Their clients are some of the biggest companies in the world who chose Localytics over some of the "bigger vendors" the digital measurement space because of it's advanced product capabilities. This includes brands like eBay, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, The New York Times, ESPN, Tumblr, CVS and Fox. Localytics currently supports more than 5,000 customers and reaches more than 20,000 apps, over 1 billion devices, and 50 billion data points monthly.

  • Looker Open to view Nominee Details

    Looker is modernizing business intelligence with a web-based tool that takes advantage of advancements in database technology. Looker uses a 100% in-database approach, so customers can operate on big data and find the last mile of value in the new era of fast analytic databases, without ever leaving the browser. Users can build complex models on top of any dataset, transforming data on the fly and building new models from raw data in a matter of minutes. Since Looker relies on customer’s existing databases for query processing, there is no need to move, re-architect, or unsecure their data for analytics.  Looker's 100% in-database approach is revolutionary. Other BI tools still approach big data analysis by aggregating big data, then transferring the aggregated data to a BI tool database. The problem with this is that is limits data discovery. If you can only operate on aggregates, you can't explore to detail. Also, part of creating aggregates is presupposing what questions will be asked – which isn't true data discovery. Looker enables companies to explore ALL of their data, instantly and without query restrictions. 

    An agile development environment enables today’s data rockstars to model the data and create end-user experiences that make sense for each specific business, transforming data on the way out, rather than on the way in. Looker breaks down the silos of information in an organization - any can perform powerful analytics without needing to know how a query is written – as easy as typing in a Google search. This expands the genius of the data team by enabling employees in an enterprise to ask and answer their own questions easily, without having to ask for the help of the data team. All searches are accessible to everyone in an organization. Employees can get smarter analytics faster, making BI more actionable. Looker's data visualization and chat capabilities also encourage curiosity-driven and collaborative analytics. Users are also able to access data across all devices. Since Looker creates unique URLs for each report, collaboration amongst colleagues is simple, and integration into custom or 3rd parties apps is limitless. 

    Looker, founded by languages expert and CTO Lloyd Tabb, wrote their own powerful data modeling language, LookML. Unlike legacy BI platforms, built around the idea of ETL and OLAP cubes, and unable to take advantage of the intended capabilities new analytics databases can offer, Looker is modeled on the concept of ELT. This means the Looker BI platform models data to be transformed at query time without moving the data or reshaping it in anyway, enabling more comprehensive, high-resolution analytics for anyone in the organization to take advantage of. 

    Since Looker is 100% in-database, it is the only BI tool that truly leverages big data and advancements in database services. In November of 2013, Looker announced it added Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS support in order to deliver modern BI to customers using the cloud. Looker’s data discovery platform builds on the power of AWS infrastructure to deliver powerful and cost-effective analytics. Specifically, Looker compliments the advanced cloud infrastructure of AWS by relying on the underlying database for query processing. Customers can build their own big data cloud on AWS, then use Looker to take full advantage of the power and ease-of-use of AWS database services—without any need to move, re-architect, or unsecure their data for analytics. 

    Looker recently secured $16 M in series A funding from Redpoint Ventures, and initial funding from First Round Capital. In just ten months, Looker has doubled its customer base to over 50 customers, and seen its prospect opportunity pipeline grow to well over 300%.  

    Most customers grant access to a majority of their organization. 90% of employees at SimplyHired have access to Looker, 60% of employees at HotelTonight have access. Looker enables the everyday data scientist in the average business user, while still delivering the most complex and comprehensive view of a company’s data. Looker launched in March 2013.  

    How Looker is Advancing the BI Industry with Game-Changing Technology: 

    The BI industry missed an innovation cycle because companies continued to evolve on their original BI base technology, but didn’t reinvent the core in order to take advantage of the new generation of analytic databases and other technology innovations. Looker built a data platform that modernizes BI by tearing down the traditional BI foundation and rebuilding it in a modern architecture, focusing on delivering an extremely powerful analytics platform.  

    Businesses need flexibility in analyzing data without pre-determining what may need to be analyzed in the future, and need to manage very disparate and large data sets. The current data warehousing industry and methodology has forced businesses to continually operate from report to report because BI tools are built to operate the same way - including “new” innovations like Tableau/Qlik and Cloud BI like GoodData, Birst, and others. The problem is that traditional data warehouse processes were built to operate in an era of small data, with extremely high costs for RDBMS like Teradata. A few years ago, there was no options other than Hadoop. It's the right concept but the wrong technology for the problem. 

    If you combine a new data management landscape that operates on commodity hardware, sometimes in the cloud, at low costs with RDBMS that can commute massive sets of raw data like in-memory or MPP systems, then you have the opportunity to change the way businesses operate on RDBMS. However, this opportunity needed a new approach at the BI level. Looker’s approach rejects cubing, transforms data at query time via a language to make SQL more effective for analytics, uses the underlying database to do it's analytical processing, and gives anyone in the business, report consumers to developers, a single, browser-based interface to interact with, explore, and analyze data on the fly. Today’s business leaders and data innovators were raised on the web, and they’re looking for tools that work the way the web works. Looker has completely re-architected the BI stack for this new wave of curiosity-driven businesspeople. This is the future of how businesses are going to find the last mile of value from their data.

    View the supporting documentation for Looker.

  • Piwik Open to view Nominee Details

    Piwik is the biggest open source free analytics platform written by an international team, used by over 1,052,589 web sites, 1.2% of all websites and has been translated to more than 53 languages. Piwik is the most popular independent analytics platform in Germany (with the market share of 16%) according to the W3Tech study (http://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-de-/traffic_analysis). Piwik compliant with German data privacy protection laws, while Google’s privacy policy and terms of service violate German data protection law.  Piwik helps to gather and analyze important information about web users. Track Key Performance Indicators such as visits, goal conversion rates, downloads, keywords and many more. Everyone can extend Piwik functionality by adding new plugins from the Piwik Marketplace. 

    Piwik should get the Award, because it’s not only focus of privacy protection and safety of data, but what is even more important Piwik’s educate people about it and has an international community engaged in development of this open source free analytics solution. Our team comes from different part of a globe: New Zealand, France, Poland, USA, Canada, Germany.  It’s phenomenal, because it’s created by people to help other people with respect of privacy.  

    In December 2013 Piwik 2.0 was launched and comes with over 171 improvements & features in the new redesign version, Marketplace for Plugins and Themes. New completely redesigned Mobile app-Piwik Mobile 2 keeps users in the know about their web traffic allowing them to see their statistics from anywhere.  

    Last year we solve analytics problems of corporations, SMEs and governments such as Accenture, ALDI SÜD, Hewlett- Packard, Lufthansa Systems and Government of Canada.

    View the supporting materials from Piwik.

  • Tealium Open to view Nominee Details

    In today’s data-driven world, marketers are challenged with the lack of data integration between vendors and no simple way to turn customer insight into action in a timely manner. Additionally, today’s marketers are plagued with a lack of insight into the entire customer journey because it is difficult to correlate the vast amounts of digital data that is created across multiple digital touchpoints and provide a more personalized experience. 

    In late September 2013, Tealium, the leader in enterprise tag management and digital data distribution platforms, launched Tealium AudienceStream, a new audience segmentation and digital data distribution platform that helps marketers realize the promise of big data by making it easy to identify and leverage actionable audiences in real time.  

    As a result of its unique integration with tag management, Tealium AudienceStream’s patent-pending technology revolutionizes the tag management and data distribution industry as the first service of its kind to enable marketers to unify their cross-vendor, cross-platform audience data; segment and enrich it (e.g., lifetime customer value for e-commerce customers); and take action on that data using their existing digital marketing applications. 

    AudienceStream also enables marketers to work with third-party vendors through an integrated distribution marketplace to drive better results for remarketing and real-time site personalization. Marketers can instantly send their actionable audience streams to major digital vendors that span multiple categories, including email, multi-channel messaging, content management, site optimization, customer relationship management, data management, data visualization, business intelligence and data warehousing platforms. 

    AudienceStream is driving marketing results for businesses across several verticals and business models, including e-commerce, publishing, lead generation, financial services, and more. AudienceStream, in combination with Tealium’s tag management solution, provides marketers with a simple way to unify digital marketing efforts. 

    Visitor remarketing: Tealium AudienceStream can fuel complex rules for remarketing by streaming applicable data to email service providers as they happen. For example, an e-commerce site can leverage AudienceStream to create segments around VIPs (e.g., those who’ve spent over $1,000 in their lifetime), and who have not visited the site in the last two weeks. As soon as the two-week threshold is met, the user’s favorite category can be sent to an email service provider (i.e. ExactTarget, Responsys, CheetahMail, etc.) in order to bring the visitor back to the site. 

    Site personalization: One of the capabilities of AudienceStream is its ability to fuel real-time site personalization. A publishing site, for example, can leverage AudienceStream to track a user’s favorite category (i.e. sports, politics, world news, etc.) across multiple sessions and even multiple devices. As the user enter the site, AudienceStream can extract the favorite category in real time and push the information either back to the CMS or the client browser so that the personalized content is promoted to the user. 

    Improved site conversion: Thanks to the real-time nature of AudienceStream, relevant information can be sent back to the site or the CMS in realtime that will help fuel site conversions. For example, you can use AudienceStream to define the funnel and define when a visitor might be stuck in the funnel (i.e. visitors spending over 10 minutes in the purchase flow of an e-commerce site and not getting past the checkout page), and provide a chat option to the user as soon as the event is triggered. 

    The demand for AudienceStream has been exceptionally strong, helping Tealium increase revenue 140 percent during 2013 and more than double its enterprise customer base. New AudienceStream customers booked in Q4 2013 include: Ancestry.com, Coastal Contacts, Dimension Data, Lincoln Financial Group, and dozens more.

    References/Testimonials
    "The term 'real-time' is often misused in describing digital marketing products; but the value of 'real-time' is immense as consumers today expect personalization instantly at the time of interaction. Tealium’s AudienceStream delivers a unique, automated, unified approach to audience discovery and data distribution that enables marketers to leverage a fully-correlated visitor profile, across all channels and vendors’ data bases, in a truly responsive manner that's as close to real-time as we've seen. Tealium is highly deserving of the nomination for Best New Technology of the Year at the DAA Awards of Excellence."
    - Andrew Edwards, a digital marketing executive [link to www.efectyv.com] and DAA founder.

    “For too long, marketers have struggled with a lack of data integration between vendors and no easy way to turn customer insight into action in a timely manner,” said Eric Peterson, an internationally recognized author and the founder of Web Analytics Demystified, a leading digital analytics consulting firm. “Tealium AudienceStream offers an important breakthrough for transforming customer data into marketing action on a real-time basis.”
     “Tealium AudienceStream is helping us maximize the value of our visitors by providing a more personalized experience based on segments and personas that we create,” said Matthew Belitsky, Manager of Marketing Intelligence at Mindjet, which provides brainstorming and collaboration software and services. “Using Tealium’s tag management solution in combination with AudienceStream provides us with a powerful way to streamline digital marketing efforts, create a cross-channel, cross-vendor view of our visitors and increase revenue.”
    “Marketers are custodians of data and use these insights to drive ROI for their companies. However, the exponential growth of customer data has created data integration challenges that are very complicated. I believe, that with Tealium’s AudienceStream, marketers now have a solution where they can unify their existing marketing applications and take action on highly targeted customer data with a level of ease that I haven’t seen before. I support the nomination of Tealium AudienceStream for New Technology of the Year at the 2014 DAA Awards of Excellence."
    -Rand Schulman, digital marketing expert, web analytics pioneer, DAA co-founder.
    Web Site

     Press Release:


    Articles:

    View the supporting materials from Tealium.

  • Tracking First Open to view Nominee Details

    I feel so sheepish nominating myself, but after 10 years in the industry, I've finally contributed in a way that, at least to me, seems significant. I've built a tracking code generator that recognizes the patterns your company has established, both in the way you assemble your codes, and in the way you classify them (for Adobe Analytics users). It then allows people to create new codes whenever required, and have them automatically classified and validated at that very moment, so the days of missing campaign data in your reports are over. We have some exciting lighthouse clients (TIAA-CREF and Carlson-Rezidor Hotel Group), and are in the contract negotiation phase with about a dozen more.

  • W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Standard Community  Open to view Nominee Details

    The W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Standard community was chartered by IBM in 4Q 2012 and immediately supported by other industry leaders like Google, Ensighten, Qubit and Adobe. The group has ultimately expanded to over 100 individual members representing 55+ companies in the digital analytics and marketing space, has been the crucial group for developing a long-sought standard for a web data layer, a potentially liberating technology for web analysts, implementation engineers, marketing professionals and many more who use digital interaction information for analysis and reporting. This represents an unprecedented level of cooperation and collaboration between vendors, clients and analysts to develop a technical standard for our industry. This standard promises to shorten time to onboard new services, lower page weight and reduce maintenance costs. Further, it lays the basis for new innovations in channel attribution and improved data governance. Just as significantly, the precedent set by this collaborative community group opens the door for additional technical standards that can drive an open architecture, encourage data portability and facilitate interoperability in our rapidly growing industry.

Most Influential Agency/Vendor (Group)

  • Adobe Open to view Nominee Details

    In order to better meet the needs of marketers, analysts and CMOs, Adobe took 27 digital marketing products and created six core solutions in Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe Analytics was created by rationalizing seven products into a single solution, which has more capabilities and features packed into a single offering than any other digital marketing or analytics vendor in the world.  

    Adobe Analytics has a leading 41 percent market share of enterprise analytics customers. Since launching in 2013, Adobe Analytics has seen significant market attraction as its $1-million-per-year club doubled in size to more than 70. 

    Adobe Analytics Fortune 500 Customers Include:

    • Top 7 Telecommunications Companies
    • Top 4 Pharmaceutical Companies
    • Top 3 Apparel Companies
    • 9 of Top 10 Tech Companies
    • 6 of Top 10 Financial Services Companies 

    Adobe Analytics enables its customers to create a holistic view of their business by turning customer interactions into actionable insights. With intuitive and interactive dashboards and reports, you can sift, sort, and share real-time information to provide insights you can use to identify problems and opportunities. 

    2013 saw Adobe continue to drive analytics innovation and provide new powerful capabilities that increase marketers’ and analysts’ abilities to put their data to work. Some of the key features released included:

    • Real-time reporting gives marketers high-granularity data surfaced within seconds of collection. The real-time API has been widely adopted and used across dozens of dashboards already and was a big hit for Adobe’s customers as they watched reports refresh during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
    • Anomaly detection allows users to surface statistically significant spikes or dips across any metric without having to run dozens of individual reports.
    • New predictive marketing workflows, including statistical correlations, audience clustering and propensity scoring.
    • New mobile app SDK and tracking lets customers see not only how users engage with their mobile apps, but also how those apps are performing with new lifecycle metrics.
    • The release of the Analytics Capability Maturity Model, an industry self-assessment tool, allows organizations to compare their analytics practice maturity compared to industry benchmarks across seven categories.
    • In video, Adobe Analytics upgraded a number of critical reporting metrics, including the ability to capture video user data every 10 seconds for content and every five seconds for online ads using "heartbeat" measurements.
    • Adobe acquired tag management solution Satellite and then later announced Dynamic Tag Management (DTM), which is free for all Adobe Customers. It adds robust tag management capabilities, simplified deployment and the ability to apply rules for when tags fire on a page. DTM supports any marketing technology including Google Analytics.

    View the supporting material for Adobe:

  • Alight Analytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Alight Analytics is an independent marketing analytics firm offering industry leading multi-channel marketing analytics solutions for global marketers. By uniting our clients' offline and online marketing channel data, we provide a transparent, comprehensive view of marketing performance and return on investment. In combination with our team of experts who provide ongoing insights and analysis, we help companies make data-driven marketing decisions.  

    In today’s highly complex and competitive marketing ecosystem, marketing organizations have evolved from “decision makers” to “data gatherers.” This evolution has created a reactionary environment, creating huge organizational inefficiencies and a lack of vision that can hinder marketing optimization and future marketing strategies. 

    Alight understands that the challenges facing marketers today cannot be solved with more software or consulting firms. The marketing industry faces a data challenge, and this challenge requires best-in-class technology and marketing analytic experts together in one solution. This is Alight's approach. We provide clients an end-to-end marketing analytic solution.  

    As a Google Analytics Certified Partner and a Google Analytics Premium Reseller, Alight brings together all of the resources and technology required to truly understand marketing return on investment (ROI) and deliver a competitive advantage for its clients. This approach uniquely positions Alight to develop and implement complex marketing measurement strategies, eliminate the time marketers spend gathering and manipulating data, and increase the time they spend optimizing their marketing spend.  

    Alight is a pioneer in multi-channel marketing analytics, delivering best-in-class analytics solutions since 2007. We are driven to help clients build a data-driven culture through our proven four step methodology: "Track - Measure - Target – Predict." This intentional strategy combined with Alight’s full-service approach delivers the solution that organizations of all sizes need to drive marketing success. 

    Alight's business analytics initiative is focused on the integration of three key pillars - our approach, our platform and our people.  

    The first pillar, our four step approach, is an intentional process, designed to ensure the proper foundation is set for success. Our approach of Track - Measure - Target - Predict begins with Tracking. The Tracking phase ensures accurate and complete data. After a complex needs analysis, an in-depth measurement strategy is constructed to set the framework for all initiatives to come. Next, a web analytics strategy is developed for all associated web properties. For omni-channel clients, our proprietary ChannelMix ID technology is implemented to tie online and offline customers together and give visibility to the entire purchase path.  

    The Measuring phase pulls all key online and offline marketing performance data together with relevant sales, call center and other custom business-critical metrics into our ChannelMix marketing data warehouse. Custom dashboards are developed to deliver answers to the business questions outlined in the measurement strategy and our Marketing Analysts provide insightful recommendations to clients. Dashboards may be viewed and interacted with 24/7 via our secure portal, www.ChannelMix.com.    

    When the Targeting phase is implemented, the real fun begins. Both out-of-the-box and custom attribution models are created by our Data Analysts and Data Scientists. Understanding the path to purchase and how the marketing ecosystem is working together is critical for planning and optimizing marketing campaigns. Multi-channel attribution exposes the relationship between marketing channels and devices. Omni-channel attribution, using our ChannelMix ID technology, ties online behavior to in-store behavior, for a full-view of the customer's path to purchase.  

    Predicting is the final phase of our approach and builds on all the data collected and stored in ChannelMix. A variety of predictive analytics models are employed by our Data Analysts and Data Scientists with the goal of discovering a previously hidden insight, which in turn can provide a competitive advantage or address a pressing business problem.  

    Our second pillar is our platform. Alight uses a multi-tier, multi-network architecture to store and manage all of our clients' data, consisting of a proprietary API call and storage process built around Google Analytics. This core architecture is then extended to support multiple marketing, media, and sales data sources. To our clients, this is a seamless process that takes the pain of copying and pasting source data away completely, leaving them time to focus on taking action on the resulting insights.  

    Our third pillar is our people. The combination of our platform plus a dedicated team of proactive resources is what really makes Alight unique. Each client has a team of five experts that become an extension of their internal and agency teams, including a Senior Marketing Analyst, a Marketing Analyst, a Data Analyst/Data Scientist, a Web Analytics Manager and a Database Developer.  

    Our three pillars provide a full-service, holistic marketing analytics solution that is a first of its kind in our industry and very effective for helping marketers make informed decisions to optimize their marketing ecosystem.

  • Analytics Pros Open to view Nominee Details

    Analytics Pros Analytics Pros is may be one of the leading digital analytics firms you may not know well that serves many of the largest brands and websites you've most certainly know. Founded in 2009 to be a pure-play digital analytics consultancy, they've stayed true to that line to this day with a sharp focus on Google Analytics. They've led the GA industry with founding the GAUGE conference series and, more recently, the conference series BEST Practices for Google Analytics. The team at Analytics Pros includes a cast of experts in GA that produce some of the best Google Analytics implementations out there, create business-aligned strategies, train clients and support them, and help transform organizations through using digital Analytics effectively. Work by Analytics Pros has been featured in numerous case studies, on the Google Analytics blog, and included in events such as the Google Analytics Summit. Analytics Pros also contributes to the industry with an active blog, contributions to other blogs, and a number of tools and resources including open-source libraries for Google's new Universal Analytics in several server-side and classic programming languages.

    Additionally, Analytics Pros is now the leading reseller of Google Analytics Premium and continues to evangelize digital Analytics across the US and abroad through its conferences. The company has sustained rapid growth for 5 years while still maintaining its laser focus on delivering world-class digital analytics consulting services to its clients.

  • Cognizant Technology Solutions Open to view Nominee Details

    The Cognizant Digital Analytics help customers measure and optimize interactions with  target audiences across all digital channels. Using Web analytics and our digital measurement solutions, customers be able to create better online experiences and leverage cross‑channel relationships with their customers. 

    Cognizant's global team of 150 certified marketing consultants come from a wide range of relevant backgrounds, including business consulting, statistics and network architecture. Many work with our Fortune 500 clients using the latest marketing and design tools from leaders such as Adobe Omniture, IBM and Tealeaf. 

    Our strategic alliances with global partners including Adobe, IBM, Tealeaf, Ensighten and Tealium enable Cognizant Interactive to deliver world-class solutions with zero execution gaps from strategy to implementation. 

    http://www.cognizant.com/cognizant-interactive/digital-marketing-and-analytics

    Read the Cognizant white paper on "A Tag Management Systems Primer".

    View the supporting materials for Cognizant.

  • comScore Open to view Nominee Details

    In 2013, comScore launched validated Media Essentials™ (vME™) to enable publishers and media sellers to understand the viewability, audience composition and engagement of their advertising inventory. Built on the comScore Digital Analytix® platform and applying the measurement methodology used in the industry-leading comScore validated Campaign Essentials® (vCE®), vME helps media sellers increase inventory sell-through and advertising revenue. 

    Heading into 2014 there is an increased industry focus on viewable impressions and audience-based buying, as a result of the Making Measurement Make Sense initiative governed the Media Rating Council (MRC). vME provides media sellers with a tool designed specifically for them, so they can:

    • Forecast demographics for audience guarantees in a manner consistent with how traditional offline media is sold.
    • Understand which ad slots on their websites are performing the best in terms of viewability, audience composition, and engagement (i.e. non-transient mouse-over of the ad) as well as evaluate GRPs and validated GRPs generated by the site(s).
    • Evaluate inventory performance according to different reporting hierarchies, such as by individual ad slots, aggregations of ad slots, entire site sections, and other customizations.
    • Re-evaluate their site design, sales strategy and overall approach to advertising packaging and pricing in order to optimize yield and increase revenue.
    • Create custom packages and sponsorships for clients that differentiate their offerings from competitors. 

    While advertisers have been able to leverage viewability and audience data to improve their digital marketing ROI with different solutions, prior to vME media sellers have not had tools available to enable them to demonstrate the value of their high-quality inventory. The sell side needed an enterprise level, total inventory knowledge platform from which to create optimal ad packages, redesign pages, and understand how their users vary by demographic at an ad slot, creative group, or section basis. comScore worked diligently to bring to market validated Media Essentials as the first solution to address this need.
    Supporting Material:

  • Convertro Open to view Nominee Details

    Today, marketing that is truly competitive requires an actionable understanding of how customers interact with online and offline channels, even when these interactions occur across devices. Businesses can no longer justify trial-and-error marketing, nor risk investing time and money into ineffective marketing resources and campaigns.

    Convertro goes beyond rudimentary marketing analytics in helping brands make data-driven decisions on where to spend their next dollar. Convertro uses a scientific, machine learning algorithm to collect and analyze customer-level data across platforms and devices to report results at a highly granular level, calculate the return on investment (ROI) for each marketing channel, and make actionable spend recommendations that optimize profitability. 

    Convertro’s multi-touch attribution solution reflects the importance of tracking customer interactions across devices. Convertro’s solution maps out each customer’s path to conversion by identifying each customer’s online and offline marketing exposures and interactions across devices. Tracking customers across devices is paramount in determining the effectiveness of a marketing channel’s effectiveness.

    An average American already owns an average of 1.57 mobile devices today, according to GSMA Intelligence, an affiliate of a global trade association that represents more than 700 GSM mobile phone operators across 217 territories and countries of the world. The paths to conversion will only increase in number, as well as in complexity. For example, GigaOm Research reports that nearly 40 percent of users browse their mobile devices while watching TV.

    This trend of multiple-device use highlights the value of Convertro’s cross-device tracking feature in providing brands with accurate and detailed insights into the patterns of consumer behavior and the preferences of diverse customers.  Convertro also understands that multiple-device attribution insights are only valuable to the extent they are actionable. Convertro combines these insights with a brand’s spend data across various marketing channels to display the ROI for each marketing channel.

    Convertro uses the ROI to generate spend optimization recommendations, which can be as granular as specific networks, programs, days and times, and keywords. The granularity of these recommendations help the brand identify specific reallocations for their spend optimization. Convertro can provide these spend recommendations as frequently as daily.  

    The following example illustrates how Convertro tracks multiple-device customers and generates actionable recommendations.

    A customer, Chris, sees a commercial on TV for Dollar Shave Club. That commercial leads Chris to use his laptop to research the products more thoroughly on Dollar Shave Club’s website. Chris then uses his tablet to order from Dollar Shave Club. Convertro follows Chris across each device to accurately capture the lift from the TV spot and scientifically attribute each channel in his path to conversion. Furthermore, Convertro automatically combines Chris’ interaction data, as well as that of other customers, with Dollar Shave Club’s marketing spend data to produce actionable recommendations for Dollar Shave Club to readily optimize their marketing spend.   Dollar Shave Club is a client of Convertro, and Convertro’s accurate and actionable recommendations helped Dollar Shave Club ramp up its radio and TV advertising.   Adam Weber, Dollar Shave Club’s vice president of consumer marketing, stated that “Dollar Shave Club had great success with online video marketing, but we didn’t want to make the leap into broadcast without the ability to test, measure and improve our campaigns. Convertro determines which radio and TV buys are profitable for our brand and recommends strategic adjustments that continue to improve our results.”   Convertro addresses an important and growing attribution problem in today’s marketing projects, and does so in a manner that generates immediate and significant value to its clients.

    The attached case studies detail specific statistics and real-world examples on how Convertro helped Dollar Shave Club, Bonobos and Wine Enthusiast overcome their issues with investing in marketing channels, such as embarking on TV advertising, segmented consumers and inefficient channels.

    Convertro provides clients from diverse industries and of various sizes with actionable insights into each customer’s path to conversion. These insights help brands understand how their customer interacts with both online and offline channels, even when these interactions occur across devices.

    In recognition of the value that Convertro’s attribution solution provides to its clients, we are nominating Convertro for the DAA Award for Excellence for Most Influential Vendor/Agency.

    View the supporting materials for Convertro.

  • E-Nor, Inc. Open to view Nominee Details

    Thanks to the community, customers and team members, 2013 was the most amazing year for E-Nor.  Their platform-agnostic Digital Analytics and Optimization Framework, a process combined with senior consulting expertise, enabled some of the world's most recognized brands become more data-driven. For over 10 years, E-Nor, established as a trusted analytics advisor, has aptly delivered measurement strategies, implementation, reporting, analysis, training, and data visualization, allowing companies to leverage data and make informed business and marketing decisions.

    E-Nor's veteran consultants are proactive contributors in the analytics community, from speaking at industry events (eMetrics, mLearnCon, WebCongress, Tableau Conference, etc.) to publishing thought leadership articles (including its own blog as well as the official Google Analytics Blog):

    • Insight-rich Case Studies on Real World topics such as Mobile Analytics & Tag Management Systems

    E-Nor's Principal Consultant, Feras Alhlou, is the Co-Chair for the San Francisco DAA Chapter and helped organize two symposiums in the last two years

    Lastly, with gratitude we are delighted to share E-Nor delivered on its philanthropic commitment to support non-profits in a variety of ways, including Pro-Bono Consulting of over 750 hours in 2013 as well as monetary contributions of more than 1% of 2013 revenue.

  • Ensighten Open to view Nominee Details

    This is my nomination for Ensighten as the most influential vendor. Additionally, I would not hesitate to nominate them for new technology of the year. I work for Symantec and believe we are among the leading users of digital marketing technologies. Historically, we've been recognized for our efforts in pushing optimization to the limit — from running 100's of simultaneous campaigns to executing algorithmic modeling to drive personalization through innovative uses of common technology. In the past year, we've continued our push by implementing a DMP (with integrations into our A/B testing stack), tackling multi touch attribution, extending our personalization solution to include a number of online and offline data sources, and integrating VOC with our A/B testing program (in practice & technically). I can honestly say Ensighten has been the single most important technology that has enabled us to deliver these results. It's the glue that powers marketing on our web and eCommerce platforms.   

    In addition to integrating new technologies on our web properties, we've greatly expanded our digital marketing footprint in the last year. After staring with our consumer business unit, we've expanded to SMB, Enterprise, and product portals. This would not have been possible without Ensighten technology. The recent release of the manage 2.0 capabilities has been essential to doing tag management at enterprise scale. When I think about scale, it's not the volume that creates the most complexity, rather it's deploying across so many websites and dealing with numerous development teams. The features Ensighten provides (especially around spaces) is mandatory in this type of environment. The ability to govern (controls), build tags in development environments, then merge to production is a must.   

    I cannot envision a scenario where were would be able to deliver these capabilities across so many sites and teams without Ensighten.   

    The flexibility the solution provides is also unmatched. For example, we do not use the Ensighten technology like most clients (we hand code everything by choice). That said, the fact that it is able to meet the needs of clients like us as well as those that prefer to write almost no code is a testament to its versatility. To me, Ensighten has delivered much more than just a tag manger, it's really a platform. Admittedly, tag management isn't a new technology at this point; however, I firmly believe the new capabilities Ensighten has delivered this year more than justify the award for new technology of the year.   

    When evaluating the most influential vendors in the analytics community I don't think you can overstate the importance of a vendor that enables 100's of (virtually any) technologies to be deployed at will. When I describe to others the biggest benefit of a tool like Ensighten, it's always the same story. In the last year I've never had a discussion with a marketing technology vendor where I've spent more than 30 minutes talking about implementation feasibility. I know everything is possible. Instead of worrying about the "how" we spend our time on the "what" and are better able to deliver for our customers for it.   

    Lastly, early this year we changed the way we organize internally in large part to Ensighten. We now have a marketing technology team within our development group, which manages the tool Symantec wide. Often people start with tag management to get around IT (in our case dev) -- and we were no different. However, after realizing the power of the tool, we integrated and built a team around it. There are very few technologies that can change a company's culture and how they organize. But, Ensighten is one of those technologies.

  • ForeSee Open to view Nominee Details

    ForeSee is a pioneer and leader in customer experience analytics – helping companies measure customer satisfaction across channels (in-store, mobile, Web, contact center, social and company-level). With ForeSee’s analytics and analysis, companies can see how they’re doing, what they should do differently, and what impact those changes will have on customer experience (CX) and the bottom line. 

    ForeSee’s impact on the customer analytics industry has been astounding. Since 2012, ForeSee has helped customers save hundreds of millions of dollars – with those companies identifying and implementing changes that have forged a measurably better experience for their own customers. ForeSee believes that companies can’t manage what they don’t measure, and in June 2013, it achieved an important milestone: collecting the 100 millionth customer satisfaction survey on behalf of clients. 

    ForeSee’s analytics support the decisions of 60 of the top 100 retailers, 200 government agencies and departments, six of the top 10 banks and more. In 2013, ForeSee announced new or expanded relationships with Alaska Airlines, Comcast, Kohl’s, Medicare.gov, the National Cancer Institute, PNC Bank, Stream Energy and more. 

    Stream Energy serves as a solid example of a company that improved its customer experience because of ForeSee’s analytics. ForeSee’s measurement of Stream Energy’s CX initiatives to drive agent performance boosted the company’s customer satisfaction score by 20% in the past year. As noted in a Forbes profile this year of ForeSee and its customers, NFLShop.com, Hickory Farms and Perry Ellis all recently used ForeSee to improve CX and grow their businesses. 

    In 2013, ForeSee introduced a new way to capture the full measure of the customer experience: the Word-of-Mouth Index (WoMI).  

    Based on 18 months of research and the collection of more than 1.5 million surveys from over 300 companies, ForeSee found that Net Promoter Score (NPS®), the customer loyalty metric used by more than 83% of U.S. companies, was off by 270% – potentially causing some of the nation’s leading companies to make bad business decisions and squander millions of dollars.  

    To address this imbalance, ForeSee introduced the Word-of-Mouth Index℠ (WoMI℠): The Next Generation Net Promoter Score (NPS®) in May 2013, and in July, released the most in-depth study on NPS to date. This benchmark of customer loyalty scores for the top 100 U.S. brands contained eye-opening figures that are now impelling brands to reevaluate their tactics and spending around customer experience methods. 

    In a nutshell, NPS was designed to measure customer loyalty, but it falls short because it fails to distinguish between positive and negative word-of-mouth. This problem with NPS is exacerbated because word-of-mouth is more important now than ever – with consumers holding more power than ever because of barrier-busting social media platforms that magnify the power of their voices. The decade-old NPS never evolved to keep up with today’s changing world. 

    WoMI augments NPS by adding a second critical question: “How likely are you to discourage others from doing business with this company?” The responses from that question evolve NPS by measuring both likelihood to recommend and likelihood to detract from a brand – delivering a more precise, accurate and actionable measurement. WoMI allows organizations to take action to increase customer satisfaction and improve the overall customer experience – taking NPS to the next level of usefulness. 

    Using WoMI has helped Pear Tree Greetings make sense of the shifting consumer landscape. The personalized greeting card company uses results from WoMI to allocate resources and prioritize investments, having calculated that for each one-point increase in satisfaction, the company brings in $1 million more in sales annually. Using WoMI to focus the company more deeply on customer satisfaction, Pear Tree Greetings has successfully raised its satisfaction score several points and is able to stay competitive.
    Supporting URLs:

    View the supporting materials for ForeSee.

  • Localytics Open to view Nominee Details

    Localytics is a fast-growing startup that has taken the mobile analytics and marketing industry by storm. Their analytics solution is a dedicated, mobile-first solution that tackles analytics from a mobile-needs perspective, rather than simply applying traditional (and sometimes ill-fitting) web concepts to mobile.  

    More recently, they have developed a sophisticated, targeted marketing and messaging platform that allows clients to provide data-driven, personalized messaging via complete integration of their marketing and analytics solutions.  

    Their clients are some of the biggest companies in the world who chose Localytics over some of the "bigger vendors" the digital measurement space because of it's advanced product capabilities. This includes brands like eBay, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, The New York Times, ESPN, Tumblr, CVS and Fox. Localytics currently supports more than 5,000 customers and reaches more than 20,000 apps, over 1 billion devices, and 50 billion data points monthly.

    More recently, Web Analytics Demystified has created new opportunities in the industry via Team Demystified, helping to team awesome analytics professionals with great brands to continue to grow their work. If previous years are anything to go on, we look forward to great things to come from the team in the coming years.

  • Loves Data Open to view Nominee Details

    Loves Data is a digital marketing and measurement company based in Sydney, Australia, specialising in website optimisation using digital analytics, online search and display advertising, and conversion testing. 

    In 2013, Loves Data took it upon itself to showcase the potential of Digital Analytics in measuring events, goals and conversions in an offline environment. A duo of videos was produced.  

    In the first video, the Loves Data team showed how, by using Digital Analytics and a simple swipe system, caffeine consumption in the office could be tracked in real time and correlated back to periods of productivity. This video highlighted the abilities of digital analytics as a reporting platform and its potential for use in point of sale activities. Since release, this video has been a featured example in many blogs and forums and reposted by Analytics experts and marketing agencies. This video was also featured in an exhibit at Google I/O and more recently at a Google Partners live hangout on 'The Future of Big Data'.

    Following the success of the initial video, a second one was produced to feature how Universal Analytics has the potential to track human movement. By using a XBox Kinect, this time the Loves Data team demonstrated how certain movements could be tracked as events into Google Analytics. Whether it's a wave, or a hail, real life movement is now trackable. This new video is now featured on the Google Analytics Blog.  

    These two videos have made a significant contribution in shifting thinking within the Digital Analytics industry by demonstrating how real life activities can be tracked, and fed back into a digital analytics platform, finally bridging the online/offline data gap.  

    Supporting Links

  • Napkyn, Inc. Open to view Nominee Details

    After spending a few years as a senior web analyst working directly with senior executives at large e-commerce organizations across North America, Napkyn founder and CEO Jim Cain came to a key realization: while tools and systems for capturing data are great, real high-value business insight can only come from the interpretation of this data by a trained analyst.  

    Instead of taking the consulting route, Cain decided to meet the growing demand for qualified web analysts by creating a scalable, easy-to-manage and efficient analysis service to help senior executives in charge of digital make better decisions — eventually launching Napkyn in 2008. 

    Since then, Napkyn has been quietly working on disrupting the analytics industry, establishing itself as a niche provider of digital analysis and decision making support as a managed service for web and social media metrics for senior executives.  

    Napkyn helps companies create an information ecosystem for their business by removing the guesswork from digital reporting to help them make smarter, data-driven decisions. Napkyn’s general capabilities centre entirely around digital analytics, including tool integration (all clickstream tools), custom dashboard construction and evolution, detailed ad hoc and project level analysis, and strategic consulting about analytics culture and ecosystem. 

    Napkyn’s primary solution is the Analyst Program, a unique managed services program designed to function as a senior business analyst, for a fixed monthly fee. The Analyst Program has been designed exclusively for the senior executives who run digital programs in large organizations. It is driven by a team of experienced analysts who deliver a tailored on-going services program designed to convert the latent analytical capabilities of a given business into actionable insights. 

    In addition to the success of the Analyst Program, Napkyn has partnered with Google to become a Google Analytics Certified Partner and the only Google Analytics Premium Authorized Reseller in all of Canada.  

    Now with 13 employees, Napkyn brings in over $1 million in annual recurring revenue and has provided digital analysis services to over 40 major brands in North America. Organizations such as Body Central, ServiceMaster, Belk and Harry & David have benefited from Napkyn’s customized service and friendly reporting.

  • PlaceIQ Open to view Nominee Details

    PlaceIQ’s platform allows marketers to use location intelligence to deeply understand the consumers with whom they want to engage. PlaceIQ’s technology offers a truly differentiated and realistic depiction of consumer behavior as well as extensive context of the consumer journey that is highly valuable for brand advertisers. It gives marketers the unprecedented ability to understand not only whether their campaign successfully drove audiences to their store locations, but how visiting devices were different from those that did not visit. Leveraging location data on mobile devices has given PlaceIQ the power to deliver the clear picture of consumers and their purchase paths.  

    The advertising industry has long needed a metric to measure the real-world impact of digital and mobile campaigns. Place Visit Rate™ or PVR™ is a vital innovation for the industry since it provides a standard for measuring real-world, in-store ROI. Place Visit Rate™ is measured by aggregating all of the devices that were messaged during a campaign and analyzing the number of those same devices that were later seen within a specific location. Lift is calculated by comparing that number to the number of observed devices in that specific location that were not served an advertisement.

  • Search Discovery Open to view Nominee Details

    2013 was a watershed year for Atlanta-based Search Discovery (SDI), a digital agency and product development firm. In 2009, SDI’s analytics and technology team launched Satellite, a leading tag management solution, that quickly gained market share in the industry; competing with TMS products like Ensighten, Tealium and Tagman. Its unique approach to tagging allows users to define business rules and actions rather than focusing on specific tags or templates, giving it the flexibility to easily support numerous analytics and marketing tools and platforms. 

    In July 2013, Adobe Systems acquired the Satellite TMS technology from SDI, renaming it Adobe DTM. Adobe DTM has quickly become a cornerstone of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, giving Adobe clients the ability to quickly and easily launch and manage products within the Marketing Cloud – like Analytics, Target, Recommendations, etc. – as well as third party products like Google Analytics and other marketing and measurement tools. In 2014, Adobe DTM will be the de facto TMS product for many of Adobe’s current Marketing Cloud clients. SDI continues to work closely with Adobe, leveraging its product knowledge and experience with literally hundreds of DTM implementations. 

    With staff located across the country to service its national client footprint, SDI’s analytics team focuses on tackling unique challenges around web analytics, usability and information architecture. Recognizing the needs of its clients, Search Discovery has continued to develop analytics software and solutions. Just before the 2013 holiday season, SDI released its latest analytics technology, Airlock.  

    Airlock is a JavaScript library that automatically converts asynchronous Google Analytics calls into Google Universal Analytics calls, lifting the burden of having to re-tag a site when upgrading to Universal Analytics (www.searchdiscovery.com/airlock/). Released as a free, open source solution, Airlock is another example of SDI’s passion, dedication to enhancing analytics products, and expertise in the data science space. 

    Beyond software, SDI’s team is comprised of recognized leaders in the web analytics industry, many of whom are regular presenters at industry events and contributors to analytics-focused columns and blogs. They continue to work closely with brands like AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, Ticketmaster, JP Morgan, Chick-fil-A and more. 

    For more information, visit:
    Adobe DTM (Satellite)


    Airlock

  • TopSpot Internet Marketing Open to view Nominee Details

    What sets TopSpot Internet Marketing apart from other agencies is its unique reporting ability and in-depth analytics. Our transparent reports is one of the reasons Google hand picked TopSpot Internet Marketing at the onset of its Google AdWords Premier SMB Partnership Program. Our integrated strategies are data driven, from conversion improvement to using call tracking and internal search for content strategies. The majority of our clients are B2B, so we understand that offline conversions are important to track. Another service we offer is a User Behavior report, showing the IP address of other businesses visiting the website and giving the client a "warm lead." We have grown to over 600 clients in our 10 years of business and continue to give our clients extremely detailed reports, each with a meeting that covers what is important. We continue to educate our industry and clients about Analytics, participating in conferences co-hosted by Google, the Houston Interactive Marketing Association's Interactive Strategies conference and Web Analytics Houston's Web Analytics Wednesdays. We also did a series on how to use Google Analytics to identify mobile trends and capture internal search.   I'll email case studies, videos and a sample report.

  • TSW Srl Open to view Nominee Details

    TSW has always been known as an innovator in the main services of Digital analytics. Today it is among the most important in Italy and includes specialists in Adobe Cloud Marketing, Google Analytics Premium, Adwords and WebTrends.

    TSW is recognized as one of the best reality in the field of data analysis, data mining and generation tool dedicated API through the main instruments.

  • Visual IQ Open to view Nominee Details

    Marketers are under relentless pressure to quantify the impact of every one of their marketing efforts on the success of their overall marketing ecosystem. Budget dollars are continuously allotted to more channels than ever before, making it harder for marketers to truly understand how each channel is performing and how to make the most informed optimization decisions across all those channels. 

    Visual IQ helps marketers solve the challenge of how to optimize a complicated multi-channel marketing ecosystem that is continuously expanding. Its cross channel marketing attribution software products enable marketers to consolidate and normalize diverse sources of marketing performance data, analyze the TRUE impact of every online and offline channel on their overall success, and determine where to invest budget dollars in order to significantly increase marketing effectiveness.  Factors that qualify Visual IQ as most influential vendor include:  

    Market Impact: As an innovator in marketing attribution technology, Visual IQ has made a tremendous impact on the market through its creation of the industry’s first algorithmic attribution management solution. Its IQ Intelligence Suite of products provides marketers with a better understanding of how each marketing channel, campaign and tactic influences conversion behaviors such as purchases, registrations and downloads, as well as financial factors such as ROI and lifetime value. Visual IQ has also led the way in educating the marketplace on the flaws of “last click” measurement techniques by pioneering a machine-learning-based algorithmic approach called TrueAttribution®, which scientifically takes into account every marketing touchpoint and the value it contributes to a desired outcome, so marketers can easily identify opportunities for optimization. 

    Differentiated Approach: Visual IQ has a unique approach to attribution. Its technology was the first of its kind to combine and analyze data from both online and offline channels to offer an all-encompassing approach for understanding marketing performance. Visual IQ’s application suite has the ability to collect any type of marketing data available and display the information in one easy-to-use interface. Users can see the key performance indicators that they already use side-by-side with a corresponding set of attributed TrueMetrics™ in order to make informed decisions to optimize results without changing the way they already work. Visual IQ was also the first company to offer a media spend recommendation product, which elevated the science of attribution from analysis to optimization, the first to bridge the gap between media performance and customer traits, and the first to enable attributed data to be automatically pushed into media buying execution platforms. 

    Exceptional Client Results and Benefits: Visual IQ's customer base, which use Visual IQ's products to manage more than $6 billion of their marketing spend, includes many of the world’s largest and most successful brands as well as their agency partners. Its clients include seven out of Advertising Age’s top ten advertisers in the U.S., including mega-brands like General Motors, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and American Express. Its products have helped clients’ net increases in their marketing efficiency between 15-35 percent and previously assisted in moving client Vanguard Group to Advertising Age’s “Marketer A-List” by helping them decrease advertising spend per acquisition by 68 percent.  

    In addition, Visual IQ recently launched a partnership program to help clients accelerate omni-channel strategy development. The Vision Partnership Program, which includes dozens of leading marketing solution providers like BlueKai, Mediaocean, Ensighten and more, extends the benefits of the IQ Intelligence Suite through integrating with other leading technology and service providers.  

    Unprecedented Growth:  In 2013, Visual IQ grew its staff by 30 percent and its customer base by 64 percent, which contributed to a 124 percent growth in revenue. To meet the growing global demand for marketing attribution management solutions in the European market, Visual IQ also expanded its office in London and launched websites in French and German. 

    Thought leadership:  As recognized experts and evangelists, Visual IQ thought leaders regularly speak at industry conferences (including 20 events in 2013), and contribute articles to leading business and marketing publications (including 41 articles for 23 different publications and in 3 languages in 2013). In addition, its IQ Advisor™ newsletter, delivered every month for the past four years to a growing subscriber base of over 20,000, provides actionable advice and best practices in the areas of marketing analytics, integration and optimization.  

    Industry Recognition:  Visual IQ has continuously garnered industry recognition for its marketing attribution solutions and its impact on the advertising industry. It achieved “Leader” status in the first-ever Forrester Wave™: Interactive Attribution report in 2009, and was named a leader in both interactive and cross-channel attribution in two separate Forrester Wave reports in 2012. Additionally, Visual IQ was named a finalist in the Best Sales & Marketing Intelligence Software category of the 2013 and 2014 CODiE awards, and a finalist in the ‘Most Influential Vendor/Agency’ category of the 2013 DAA Excellence awards, further positioning the company as an industry leader.

  • Web Analytics Demystified Open to view Nominee Details

    Nomination #1:
    Web Analytics Demystified is the premiere digital analytics consultancy in the world. Their clients are some of the biggest brands in the world, like Best Buy, Home Depot, Nestle and Johnson & Johnson.

    Their Senior Partners and Partners are the leading authorities on analytics and testing, and (literally!) wrote the books on digital analytics.  

    In addition to industry-leading work for their clients, Web Analytics Demystified has contributed to the industry via the creation of Web Analytics Wednesday and the Analysis Exchange, and shares their knowledge via blogs, webinars and speaking engagements, as well as their yearly ACCELERATE conference and in-depth analytics trainings.  

    More recently, Web Analytics Demystified has created new opportunities in the industry via Team Demystified, helping to team awesome analytics professionals with great brands to continue to grow their work. If previous years are anything to go on, we look forward to great things to come from the team in the coming years.

    Nomination #2:
    Web Analytics Demystified is a well-known name in the analytics industry. When a question comes up about what agency might be a good fit or able to help solve difficult problems, the first agency that comes to mind is Web Analytics Demystified.  

    Demystified has been an invaluable asset to the industry as a whole, spearheading the Analysis Exchange, hosting a yearly well attended conference (ACCELERATE), providing thoughtful and useful info and industry contributions via blogs and twitter, and just being an all around fun team of people to work and socialize with.