This past week I've been in Mountain View, California, for Google's annual Website Optimiser and Google Analytics Authorised Consultant summit. Harvest Digital gained the WOAC and GAAC accreditations at the end of September.
Contrary to Dickie's ( @thesearchbaron ) accusation, the summit was much more than just GPAITS (Google's Piss About in the Sun). The WOAC/GAAC summit served primarily to strengthen the WOAC and GAAC network, which operates as Google's support for the Website Optimiser and Google Analytics products. Plus it wasn't even sunny for the first two days.
Google has quite a presence in Mountain View. My first clue about this came when the officer at San Francisco immigration saw I was staying in Mountain View and asked immediately if I was visiting Google. Someone told me that three years ago Google had only one or two buildings in the area; now, they must have twenty separate office buildings in Mountain View, maybe more. The company provides free WiFi to the whole of Mountain View, and the cab driver that took me to and from the office each day told me that eighty percent of his fares were driving people to and from Google. With all the office buildings and their support staff, the cab drivers and hoteliers, and the Google developers and executives themselves, the economic contribution that the company makes locally is very substantial (and that's not to mention all the people around the world whose jobs exist because of Google's role in the digital industry).
I didn't see the main Google 'campus' in Mountain View (the so-called Googleplex), but the buildings where we were meeting for the summit were impressive enough.
The canteen food, all free, deserves a special mention: on my first day I served myself rib-eye steak for lunch; on my next, foie gras. I've often thought when visiting the Google offices in London that somehow the whole atmosphere feels a bit staged, but the execution of 'Googliness' in Mountain View felt much more genuine; I think 'Googliness' must sit a little better with the American culture than it does with our more cynical British one.
There were three hundred and three attendees at this year's WOAC/GAAC summit. I estimate about two hundred and ninety of those attendees had an Apple iPhone - I can't imagine there being many other occasions when there are quite so many iPhones in the same mobile phone cell.
Practically the first thing we were told was not to tweet or blog about anything that was presented without the express permission of the presenter. Fair enough I suppose: much of what we heard was either a client-specific case study, or a preview of yet-to-be-released technological features. While I'll be sharing much of this stuff with my colleagues at Harvest (enough at least to convince them that it was worth sending me to California for a week), I can't publish it here.
I will offer some general description though. First of all, it was really refreshing to attend a conference where I wasn't constantly being sold to. There were two obvious commercial interests that defined the summit: the first was that of the conference attendees: we were there to learn about how to offer more and better services as consultants (no objections there!). The other was Google's, and they were quite overt about it: advertisers that use GWO and GA properly are more successful, and they spend more money on Google AdWords (again, no objections there - ad agencies stand to make money from advertising spend as much as the media supplier does).
Most of the content that was presented had to do with what was possible with advanced use of the GWO and GA products, through clever application of the API, or through clever integration with other technologies or adaptation to a client's particular needs.
On the WOAC day, much of what was presented had to do with how best to use and sell the Website Optimiser product. As Dan Siroker ( @dsiroker ) pointed out, GWO is for challenging assumptions, or as Tim Ash ( @tim_ash ) put it, it's for correcting the client's false perception that their ugly baby (a rubbish website) is handsome. As Google likes to think of it, GWO is the anti-HiPPO (the HiPPO being the 'Highest Paid Person's Opinion').
With GWO, as with GA, much of the challenge for us as consultants is figuring out how best to work a client engagement: how to communicate with various client departments, each with their own concerns, or how best to manage an engagement where multiple agencies are involved.
My week in Mountain View has brought me a little closer to the support network that exists in the combination of Google and the WOAC and GAAC partners, and it's revealed how much potential there is for my agency's expertise in the Website Optimiser and Google Analytics products to create value for our clients and for ourselves. The next step is for me to start thinking about relaying what I've learnt back to my colleagues... (how to make sure Harvest sends me again next year...).