Summary to the first WAW event held at MDIS in Tashkent
The first Web Analytics Wednesday event was held at MDIST on Nov 26, 2014 which left event participants with lots of enthusiasm, awareness and interest towards web analytics field. Although out more than 100 organisations were invited to attend, with only less than half of them were able to participate, the event proved to be very interesting, informative and interactive.
The program kicked off at around 3pm with a welcome speech by Dr Les Kingham from Sunderland University in the UK followed by Abdurashid Atahanov who briefly introduced guests to a history of Web Analytics Wednesday, its purpose and how it's run, as well as thanked MDIS in Tashkent along with Web Analytics Demystified and Tealium organisations in the US for sponsoring and supporting the event.
The program kicked off at around 3pm with a welcome speech by Dr Les Kingham from Sunderland University in the UK followed by Abdurashid Atahanov who briefly introduced guests to a history of Web Analytics Wednesday, its purpose and how it's run, as well as thanked MDIS in Tashkent along with Web Analytics Demystified and Tealium organisations in the US for sponsoring and supporting the event.
The remaining part of the event were featured by our keynote speakers Javlon Juraev (Projects Development Manager) who talked about the need and requirements of maintaining websites and use of web analytics by different business types, and Abdurashid Atahanov who talked about the use of web analytics for corporate websites optimisation, data-driven decisions and measuring online marketing campaigns effectiveness. As an analytics advocate in the region, he also talked about creating and maintaining analytics business culture in organisations. Dr Les Kingham from the UK gave another interesting speech on how students of Sunderland University use digital technologies and analytics for shaping their career paths and establishing connections with prospective employers through real life projects involvements.
Event Gallery
Participants Survey
Taking a chance of the event, we conducted a WAW Survey among participants in order to help us better understand the role of web analytics in their organisation. Here are some of the interesting findings from that survey even though the population was very small.
When asked about their company websites, almost all event attendees already operated their corporate websites but only half of them used or planned to use any web analytics tools for tracking their website visitors. This just demonstrates a low awareness about the business value of web analytics in the region, ie. in Uzbekistan.
When asked about their company websites, almost all event attendees already operated their corporate websites but only half of them used or planned to use any web analytics tools for tracking their website visitors. This just demonstrates a low awareness about the business value of web analytics in the region, ie. in Uzbekistan.
It was interesting to see that Marketing and IT departments were equally responsisible for company websites and use of web analytics tools and the larger involvement of IT departments perhaps suggest that websites and web analytics are still perceived to be highly technical activities.
The other more or less active departments in relevant decision-making process came to inhouse Corporate Communications departments along with external advertising and media Agencies.
When asked about primary company website objectives, it was revealed that organisations were mainly concerned about less practical, action driven website objectives like creating and increasing their brand awareness. While they also use their website as a tool for helping them promote and sell their products and services, they don't really treat their websites as a great tool to help them reduce their operating costs. Moreover, their websites seem to be less customer focused since they don't quite use them for providing online service to their customers or even for their audience and customer development.
On a social media scene however, they seem to be very active and taking it with higher priority as all respondents' organisations currently maintain their business presence on Facebook, with less activities directed towards establishing their presence on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Despite its global business popularity, YouTube is not yet popular among local organisations for video marketing, which could be due to time, efforts and resources required to continuously produce good quality video content or they could be also using few other local alternative sites under Other category.
But when it comes to measuring various online activities with web analytics tools, only less than half of survey respondents' companies were actually measuring performance against their primary website objectives with less than one-third of them using analytics for website content optimisation. They also don't quite use web analytis for measuring their online marketing activities like online advertising, social media marketing and SEO, not to meantion about finding ways to track their traditional advertising.
Such limited activities perhaps could also be justified with one-fourth of event participants didn't have enough in-house web analytics skills, time or even trust in data. However, for those activities they measure with web analytis, half of respondents indicated that they do make website changes or other business decisions based on analytics data.
This could mean, it could be a matter of providing them with more right data and actionable insights in order to increase their engagement and practice with web analytics.
Presentations
If you would like to have a copy of slides presented throughout the WAW Tashkent event on Nov 26th, please feel free to submit us your email address using the form below, so we will then forward you the PDF copy of the presentations.
Please note, the presentation content is in Russian language.
Please note, the presentation content is in Russian language.