metrics

I was invited over to Thinkbox last week to talk metrics with their Research & Strategy Director, David Brennan. 

We all know marketers love metrics.  Flashy award winning campaigns are great and celebrity spokespersons are always appealing, but most of the time we try to base judging the success of a campaign on hard and fast metrics.  The only problem is, many times the metrics that marketers use to gauge success are wrong, inaccurate, incomplete or just plain useless.  There are two main reasons this happens ...

Meet the Web Analytics Players: Vendors from major web analytics services each cover different metrics challenges plus answer questions about measuring success and their tools in general. Moderator: Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM Speakers: Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc, Thomas Grant, Director - Internet Marketing Solutions, Unica Corporation, Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager, Google Analytics.

Most of you know that I do a lot of teaching and speaking on the subject of search marketing, and that my approach is not what people expect. Yes, I know all the dials to turn and levers to pull. I can talk about robots.txt and Max CPC and latent semantic indexing and blah blah blah. But, honestly, it's not what most people need to know. The problem I sometimes find is that when you tell people what they need to know, they think it's not what they need.

There are lots of ways to measure the popularity of a social networking site. The general shift seems to be toward measuring engagement – how long users spend at a site and how often they show up. Even then, you'll often see the same names pop up that you would have if page views and/or unique visitors were measured alone.

Search engine giant Google has released another enhancement to its AdWords advertising platform which will allow advertisers to get a better understanding of their campaigns' performance. The new impression metrics are akin to traditional advertising's "Share of Voice" measurements.

Nielsen//NetRatings plans to bid adieu to page views, a long-time site metric that has been made obsolete by online video and Ajax page technology.

A rising star in the blog web analytics space over the last year or so was Performancing Metrics. Performancing ended up having some problems and ended up selling off the metrics and community aspect of their business to SplashPressMedia.