Web Analytics Wednesday

Web Analytics Wednesday* is a free social networking event that has been connecting digital analysts with other members of their local community that was founded in 2007 with a singular goal: to connect the world’s analysts personally, over drinks, to grow and foster our community. Since 2007 over 10,000 analysts and analytics practitioners have participated in these events, in every major city, on every continent (almost — we are still waiting for an enterprising analyst in Antarctica to step up and get the analysts there together socially).

* While WAWs are typically held on a Wednesday, there is no hard and fast rule that that be the case. See the Tips and Guidelines below.

Regional WAW Sites

The following cities have established their own sites to manage their events. If you have a site for your city, let us know and we’ll get it added to this list:

• Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
• Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
• Houston, Texas, U.S.
• Hong Kong
• Sydney, Australia (and follow @WAWSydney on Twitter)
• Denmark
• Krakow, Poland (The GDG Krakow meetup.com group; includes non-WAW events as well)
• Washington, D.C., U.S.

Specific Upcoming WAWs

If you are hosting an upcoming WAW in your city, let us know and we’ll get it added to the list below. Please include: 1) the city/region for the event, 2) the date of the event, and 3) a link (email address or URL) where people can register or find out more (see Tips and Guidelines below).

There are currently no specific upcoming WAWs for which we have been notified. Consider starting one!

Tips and Guidelines for Organizers

Since Eric Peterson co-founded the event with June Dershewitz in 2005, Web Analytics Wednesday has impacted digital analytics practitioners, consultants, and vendors around the globe. We know that well over 10,000 people have attended a WAW at some point, and those WAWs were all free, almost all sponsored, and all designed to create local community value for digital analytics professionals.

If you’re new to Web Analytics Wednesday, here are the five most important things you should know about getting an event started in your town or community:

• Web Analytics Wednesday is FREE and OPEN. By design, Web Analytics Wednesday events are open to all practitioners of web analytics and related disciplines and, thanks to the generous support of sponsors, always free!
• Web Analytics Wednesday belongs to everyone. We do not own Web Analytics Wednesday events, we are only shepherds of the brand, working to ensure consistency across a diverse global analytics community. Anyone willing to follow our very simple guidelines can establish a WAW chapter in their town.
• Web Analytics Wednesday is what you make it. Because everyone owns Web Analytics Wednesday, the event is whatever the local community wants it to be. In some cities, WAW happens over lunch. In others, in nightclubs. Sometimes there are presentations, sometimes not.
• Web Analytics Wednesday is a state of mind. These events are about local practitioners gathering together, not about a day of the week. Any day can be “Web Analytics Wednesday” … if you’re willing to put in the effort.
• Web Analytics Wednesday is a profitless system. Again by design, and with specific intent, nobody makes money off of Web Analytics Wednesday. Regardless of who buys the drinks, nobody — including Analytics Demystified — makes a single, solitary penny off of these events.

In the past, Analytics Demystified has solicited “global sponsors” for WAWs to remove (or reduce) the effort required by a local organizer to find funding for the event. We no longer are doing this. As WAWs have grown, we have found that the most successful WAWs are ones where the local organizers find and sustain sponsorships for their individual events. It is a reasonably easy sell to sponsors: a nominal cost (remember, 100% of the sponsorship goes to putting on the event — see the last bullet point above), and an opportunity to have their name in front of some of the most in-demand and talented people in the community.

We also no longer have a registration system available on this site. The feedback we received from the most active and successful organizers was that they preferred to manage the registrations and lists for their own events. Several sites offer free event management solutions (the list below is not an express endorsement of any of these sites by Analytics Demystified):

• Meetup.com — you can set up a meetup.com site for just your area’s WAW, or, in some communities, you can piggyback on an existing meetup.com that serves a similar audience
• Eventbrite
• LinkedIn — the “events” feature
• Smartcrowdz

However, we will happily add your event to one of the lists above if you just let us know about it.

If you are looking for a starter list for managing the logistics of the event, you can download and use this spreadsheet. If you take pictures at the event, we would love to have them added to the WAW Flickr group!