Web Analytics Wednesday - Data insights to round off 2018!

Hello WAW fans!

We're excited to confirm our next meetup on Wednesday 28th November! We can't believe 2018 is coming to a close - we thought we would round off the year with some exciting insights and an excuse to kick the Christmas party season off early!

Held in our usual venue, we will be on hand with snacks, beverages and some great speakers!

Speaker 1
Elliot Marsden: Senior Data Scientist. Booking.com.

Bio: Elliot is currently a senior data scientist at Booking.com in Amsterdam. He works in experimentation, developing rigorous and fast methods to test ideas in production. He previously worked as a web developer in Edinburgh, before which he completed a PhD in condensed matter physics.

Title: Cohort analysis & soft stops: Considering the full customer journey in experimentation.

Brief Description of Talk

When running A/B tests, it's simple enough to assign a value to each visitor. But this value might not capture the full picture: a customer's interaction with your service might be a long-term affair, and if you only see part of it, your test might lead to a short-sighted decision.

In this talk Elliot will outline how defining visitor time cohorts, or implementing a 'soft-stop' in your experiment design can improve this situation by ensuring each visitor has been observed for some well-defined and bounded time window.

He will also describe how these patterns can be extended to deal with: novelty effects, saturated metrics and time-shift bias. Each hazard and remedy will be illustrated by real-world examples from business.

Speaker 2
Nick Mottershead: Data Scientist. Lynchpin Analytics.

Bio: Nick Mottershead is a data scientist, specialising in Marketing Attribution, Predictive Analytics and analysing user behaviour for many high profile organisations. Working at Lynchpin Analytics, Nick helps clients to leverage data science techniques to bring commercial advantage from data using analysis bespoke and tailored to their needs. Nick has a background in mathematics, statistics and finance having studied in New Zealand. He is a big fan of all things craft beer (and Fosters). He recently presented at the Festival of Marketing 2018 to extremely successful reviews.

Title: Under the hood of Recommendation Engines – Applied Personalisation

Brief Description of Talk

Personalisation is increasingly becoming a more integral part of overall business strategy, however when faced with mountains of unactionable data the prospect of applying successful personalisation can be daunting.

Nick will explain what recommendation engines are and their range of applications in serving personalisation. He will then discuss in more technical depth specifically about Market Basket analysis, Apriori Algorithm and SPADE algorithm, how they work, their inputs and outputs and how to deploy into production with a case study to support.

What a great lineup! We look forward to seeing you all! We also have some exciting news about our meetup, and how 2019 will see WAW evolve, becoming bigger and better!

Lynchpin & cranberry panda