If someone asked you what first sparked your interest in web analytics, you'd probably say something like "solving problems using data". Most of us talk about finding insight in numbers for the benefit of whichever company is picking up the check and putting food on our tables, but how often does our work go beyond problems like "tag this" and "troubleshoot that", and really translate into solving a tangible, true, big problem for an organisation?

From Plato to Alain De Boton, philosophers have been the people tasked with finding truth, and bringing it to the masses. To a web analyst, that pursuit of truth should sound familiar: it's the job of web analytics to shine a light in the corners that reveal truth about human behaviour. In this fun and informative talk, Damion looks at how the history of philosophy has parallels with analytics best practice, and along the way ponders on whether the Digital Analytics industry might just have found an incredibly rare thing that nobody thought existed: an actual use for a philosophy graduate.

You use APIs and third-party services to automate the extraction of data from a web analytics tool. But what about automating the sending of data too? In this hands-on talk, Damion shows you how to use services like IFTTT and Zapier to augment the clickstream with context.

Web analysts don't get excited about government websites. They need conversion rates to increase, checkout funnels to optimise, paid channels to evaluate, and AB?s to test. They love Ecommerce, they love non-profits, and they might, at a push, even love a B2B. Government websites have none of these things; they're about as far removed from the crazy rock'n'roll world of conversion optimisation as it's possible to get. However, as this session will demonstrate, there's a huge amount of untapped data on government sites and huge value in connecting the dots.