Boy, oh boy have I had a day! This is the first time I am attending a Search Engine Strategies conference so I must admit that I was nervous, to say the least. But once I arrived in the windy city early this morning, there was no turning back.

The first conference session I sat in on was a meeting with the Analytics “players.” In this session there were representatives from Google—of course, Omniture and Unica. All representatives did a good job discussing what their products offered. However, the Omniture representative, Chris Knock took it a bit further. He talked about some of the key metrics to dig in to. His whole point was that just looking at the metrics given to you within your web analytics application doesn’t tell you everything you should know. He talked about going deeper by looking at bounce rates, time on site, page views, etc. and then calculating even more detailed metrics like leads initiated, leads completed, lead conversion ratios and lead completion ratios.

The other two “players” from Google and Unica basically talked about their products. Google gave a lot of detail into their additional metrics that are currently available, most of which are in beta. These metrics include internal site search where you can see what users are searching for within your website if you have an internal search function like the Amazon website, for instance. Other metrics include event tracking, outbound link tracking, new JavaScript tags that enable the new analytic features and the new Urchin 6 analytics software.

Another session I sat in on was the first Orion Panel, which highlighted Privacy in the search world. Although the Panel was more of an open discussion that proved to be somewhat interesting, the most interesting part was the opening video, in which Kevin Ryan—the moderator of this panel had pieced together several clips of popular movies and / or T.V. shows that referenced the internet in any way. These included clips from South Park, the movie Knocked Up, Transformers as well as other T.V. shows and movies that made mention of Google, You Tube, My Space, Blogs and anything else having to do with the search space.

And then of course, how could I forget the great session on Search around the World where there were speakers talking about search in the UK, Latin America and Europe. I thought this was a great session, aside from one of the speakers saying nobody really searches in Africa, except for maybe a few monkeys. I think a few people might have found that a bit offensive. Other than that, I got a lot of great information. If you think Google has a big advantage here in the United States, you should see how much search share they have in England. We’re talking at least 70%, maybe more.

To close my day off, I helped set up the booth for TMP – Wow! I didn’t realize how much work goes into setting those up. So now that the day is over, and my feet are aching and my brain is full from all of the information I took in, I have to say Day 1 at SES Chicago went well. I can only look forward to the next 3 days and see what else is in-store for me.