Roadies' highlights from MeasureCamp Helsinki

On Saturday, March 25th, we had the privilege of being a sponsor of MeasureCamp Helsinki. Four of our consultants joined the event to have insightful discussions around digital analytics. To continue the great discussions started, we share our greatest highlights from the event. 

What is MeasureCamp?

MeasureCamp is a digital analytics themed unconference. 

Well, what is an unconference? It’s an event where any attendee can host a presentation, panel discussion or a workshop. The sessions last 30 minutes each, and session topics are set on the morning of the event.

MeasureCamp has previously been popular in other cities around the world, but last weekend the event was held in Helsinki for the first time. As locals, we were especially excited about this one! That’s why we also wanted to be a silver sponsor of the event, helping ensure that the event can be held free for all attendees. 

See the MeasureCamp calendar for upcoming MeasureCamps in other cities this year.

Highlights from the MeasureCamp Helsinki sessions

The session topics were a healthy balance between business-level and technical topics. The 30-minute session duration made sure that the topics were quite concise. With such great variety in topics, it was easy to choose the one that interested each attendee the most.

A few of our favorite discussions and topics were: 

• Process mining: Process mining is an interesting and useful concept also in the context of web analytics. Visualising sessions using the event logs is helpful when developing a sales funnel and detecting problems or conversion killers affecting conversion rates. Especially, when there are multiple different paths to the conversion, it is useful to visualize those paths with events to identify areas of focus and improvement.
• A/B testing: One prominent topic was what A/B test tool to choose after the sunset of Google Optimize. The different options for platforms were also very visible in the event as sponsors. Of course there is no one right answer that fits all but the discussions helped us understand the options even better. To dive deeper, take a look at our blog post on the topic. 
• GDPR Compliance: GDPR was a major topic of several sessions. The discussion about GDPR compliance revolves around the residency of data. Additionally, it was discussed that it would not be enough to have the servers in the EU: the origin of the company could have an effect on whether foreign officials have access to the data. In addition, there was discussion about the compliance of Google Tag Manager, although many could not understand why, since GTM is not storing any data, and the only way that Google is able to get information about the user is when the user loads the configuration from the GTM website. But is that too much as well? If it is, in that case, one should throw away, for example, Google fonts as well.
• Data management: As web analytics is not a thing on its own, general questions about data management arise. There were sessions both about Dataform (hosted by our very own Laura Purontaus) and Data build tool, that both aim to make usage of event level data easier, more structured, scalable and maintainable. In short, the web analytics field should adopt some of the best practices from software development. 

Feelings after the event

Due to the pandemic, there has been a few uneventful years in terms of conferences and networking. Because of this, it was exceptionally great to get together with like-minded analytics enthusiasts and discuss these topics in the same room.

Here are some feelings our Roadies shared from the event:

“It was an inspiring day. It was motivational to brainstorm ideas about current issues, but also learn new perspectives on using web analytics technologies and platforms. However, my favorite aspect of the event was to meet like-minded people from all around the world.”

“The most interesting discussions were about the analysis part: ecommerce product performance analysis and using data science methods for path analysis. Also, there was lots of discussion about data management, in general, and about the methods and tools to do that. It shows that many companies have moved beyond “just counting sessions” and are using web analytics data as a data asset among others. This means that the technical web analyst work is approaching data engineer work.”

“It was an interesting day with lots of good discussions and presentations. Presentations provided food for thought and ideas to try out with data and analytics related projects and client cases. It was also nice to mingle and network with people working with data and analytics from different roles and industries.”

“The most memorable things were the people and the atmosphere of the event. So many good discussions at the sessions as well as in the corridors! What especially stuck with me from the sessions was that we should use the same data on dashboards as on the business reports and just supplement that with analytics data. How that is done is something we can definitely help our customers with, in the future, I believe.”

Thank you for the organisers, other sponsors, and everyone we got to meet and discuss with during the day!

Photo credits: Esa Tiusanen