Growing analytics community at MeasureCamp Brussels

A mixed audience on all levels

The analytics community was well presented and it is good to see that it is clearly growing with an attendance of around 120 analytics nerds this year. As always, the event welcomed a broad international audience, with, of course, quite some neighbours from the Netherlands, France and Germany. But also further away: Spain, Italy, Romania, and the Nordics to name a few. For 43% of the audience, it was their first time to attend a MeasureCamp event. So hopefully this one made them hungry for more and they will join the 10% of die-hards who came for the 10th time or more in a few years.

And although the audience consisted of a wide variety of newbies and experts, of more technical experts and more business minds, of practitioners and vendors, of agencies and brands, we do notice some consistency in the hot topics of the moment: GA4, privacy and GDPR, server-side tracking, storytelling, and of course football and beers (as the Netherlands played USA in the World Cup that day).

So what’s not to like to present, discuss and/or rant on these data topics over the 32 different sessions!

Only good content!

All sessions were great. Because at these types of unconferences you can simply not experience a bad session. If you attend a session that doesn’t seem to fit your interest, you just leave and go to another session. Nevertheless, 3 sessions stood out for me, of the ones that I attended of course.

1. Winter is coming in eCommerce: It's time to understand what CVO means.

Valentin Radu (Founder of Omniconvert) gave a very inspiring pitch on his view of the shift that is happening from clicks to relationships and from one-time buyers to lifetime customers. I think he really nailed it with his approach on Customer Value Optimisation. You can check the complete deck of his presentation on LinkedIn.

2. The end of web 2 and the data economy: We're fucked, I'm pissed, the end is near.

Of course, our very own Nicolas Lierman (Head of Innovation at MultiMinds) is always first in line to give his very direct opinion on the changing future of the internet. Web3.0 is coming faster than expected 1 year ago, evolving towards complete decentralisation of the internet and personal data ownership in the next 2 years. As always, he triggered a good discussion with the audience.

3. Talk to your friendly Googlers on everything GA4.

As you noticed from the topics cloud picture, there are a lot of questions, and some frustrations on GA4 features, Looker Studio quotas, etc. So I thought it was brave and positive that Weiwei Liu-Schröder & Patrick Kool (both Data & Measurement Leads at Google) took the main stage in the very first session of the day to take the shower of questions. Of course they could not commit to questions related to specific feature releases (no vendor ever does) and some questions were too technical, but at least they acknowledge some of the frustration and did confirm some updates are coming soon.

Smooth day of analytics chats

Last words of thank you go to the organising committee and all helpers! The conference day went very smoothly. Also a big thanks to the support of Google for opening their Brussels HQ as conference hall and providing all logistical support and the typical Belgian lunch. And thanks to the sponsors Tealium, Snowplow, Lytics, Piano and Bloomreach for their support.