Last week I attended my first Superweek in Hungary. A five day conference including a lot of amazing talks, great people, beautiful surroundings and a girl from the Netherlands having a blast! I can’t summarise the entire event in this single blog post, however I will take you with me to check out a few talks that really made an impact on me.

Poor men’s personalisation

With only reading the title of Sayf Sharif talk, my interest was triggered. Also, the dance performed by the first row underlined the enthusiasm in the crowd ;). He showed us that to start with personalisation you don’t need all the fancy tools. Of course that helps and makes things easier. But when asking for a budget for these tools, it just happens to be a lot easier if you already have some proof of concept. And a little bit of JavaScript injection can help you with that! For example: hide or unhide certain items on the page depending on where the traffic comes from. Align messages depending on whether your ad is on TV at the moment.

Sayf also gave us some basic insights into what works in personalisation.

“Personalisation is more effective when it’s known”

This quote didn’t immediately make sense to me, because I would assume that means you are the creepy follower. And yes, being creepy is definitely something to stay on the lookout for. But that doesn’t make this statement untrue. A good example is Netflix and their recommendations. Can you imagine how awful it would be if Netflix doesn’t know your preferences anymore and you get all things recommended that you don’t like? Netflix is so clear about their recommender system and which makes it even something that consumers love about their service.

Analytics & optimization

For me this was really interesting as I am not an optimization specialist. And I know that I have some gaps in my knowledge about this subject. So I was keen to learn more from Ton Wesseling about how analytics can add value to CRO.

What started out as a simple ABC got complicated soon enough and got me thinking about DEF ;). In his talk Ton first gave an introduction and then focused on three main topics: Data, Effect and Finance. And for these topics analytics can add value to CRO.

The key takeaways are to make sure that the data quality is as high as possible. More data = better! Steer the data chance on the effect. Don’t forget to check power, sample rate mismatch, type M errors, false and true discovery rate. A very statistical part of the job and it would be wise as an analytics specialist to know at least the basics of it. And last but definitely not least is the financial aspect and how to calculate the ROI. The ROI at the end determines if you should increase testing budget, increase knowledge or decrease budgets. So you can help convince the business based on data what to do.

Data stories and visualizations

I am going to end this blog post with a little story. During a fireside chat Miroslav Varga surprised me with a story about how important a story can be. It also related a lot with some talks about bringing analytics outside of the organization. Because we know we can really make an impact on the entire business instead of only marketing. But how do we let the business, and especially C level management know we can? I think that reducing cognitive load and making clear data visualizations and creating a great story around the data will definitely help. Last shoutout to Tim Wilson, who did a great presentation on data visualization. Instead of throwing in a graph or chart, take your time to look at where you can improve your visualizations. Where the key takeaway is to decrease cognitive load, so the user can focus on the important data, instead of on understanding what’s shown in the graph.

So here’s my story about the journey from last week. See you next year?

Once upon a time there was… a girl called Karin from the Netherlands who worked in digital analytics
Everyday… she worked with data and tried to get the most value out of it
One day… she went to Superweek in Hungary
Because of that… she met a lot of smart people in analytics
Because of that… she learned a lot from all the presentations and talks
Until finally… she returned back to the Netherlands with more knowledge and an eagerness to put everything she learned into practice