I am going to break one of my unspoken cardinal rules: Only write about real problems and measurement that is actually possible in the real world. I am going to break the second part of the rule. I am going to define a way for you to think about measuring social media, and you can't actually easily measure what I am going to recommend. So why break the rule?
99.9996253% of Web Analytics reports produced are utterly useless. Partly because of a lack of any tie to business strategy (ensure you have a Digital Marketing & Measurement Model!), partly because they are out of the box standard reports that web analytics vendors create for “average” people (and we both know that you are not average!), and partly because all they do is present data in the aggregate (a punishable criminal offence if there ever was one!).
With all the sexiness oozing out of social media it might seem insane to write about email. It’s been relegated to the “OMG that cesspool of spam that no one cares about because everyone is using Google Wave and Facebook!”
Web Analysts are blessed with an immense amount of data, and an amazing amount of valuable, even sexy, metrics to understand business performance. Yet our heroic efforts to report the aforementioned sexy metrics leads to little business action. Why?
It is surprising how often these "simple" things come up."What is the difference between a metric and a key performance indicator (KPI)?""What is a dimension in analytics?""What is segmentation?""Are goals metrics?"And many more.There seems to be genuine confusion about the simplest, most foundational, parts of web metrics / analytics. So in this short post let's try and see if we can fix this really basic problem.
