Influential Marketing Blog

Accidental Measurement And Why We Love Useless Metrics

I'm not a measurement geek by any stretch of the imagination. As much as I love a good statistic, I'd put myself in the same category as most marketers ... we realize that measurement is important, but we wish it were easier to grasp and involved less guesswork and questionable assumptions. There are many smart people talking about measurement, and we have several on our team working on a much more sophisticated model for things that have traditionally been difficult to measure such as word of mouth impact and social media engagement.

The real challenge is that measurement online has become an exercise in silliness for many marketing teams. They report on things that don't matter about behaviours that tell you little to nothing about what is actually happening online. Why? There are three core reasons your metrics might suck: because you're just measuring what you measured last year, you're focusing on just finding "one big number" to report or because you just don't know how to measure better.

Luckily, the solution for any of these reasons is increasing your knowledge about what you should measure, and what you should avoid. To help get you started, here is a list of five useless metrics that many marketers use:

• Accidental Impressions - this may be the most favorite measure that marketers like - counting impressions for ads or sites no matter how long someone stays or if they click it or not. Counting impressions without any context is like the amazing color changing card trick - you're watching the wrong thing without realizing it.
• Accidental Time Spent - time that a user spends on your site looking for what they want to click on, but unable to find it. This is not a sign of engagement (as commonly assumed) but rather a sign that your design or layout is not usable enough.
• Accidental Email Open Rate - if you use Outlook, you know that many emails are automatically opened as soon as your cursor hits them. Most email marketers count this as an "open" even though you may have opened the email by accident. If a large number of people getting your email are on Outlook, for example, that high open rate may not actually be an indication that they found the content of your message appealing.
• Accidental Clicks - who hasn't experienced that annoying banner that pops up at the least convenient time? Sometimes finding the button to close it is so difficult that you end up clicking on the ad accidentally. If you are running a campaign where you are counting these desperate clicks to make you disappear as clicks and conversions, you're getting a skewed view of effectiveness.
• Accidental "Add to Cart" - a favorite tactic of many online sites is to have every uncertain click on a product automatically add it to a cart. Other sites make you add a product to your cart before seeing the price. If you are tracking your shopping carts and conversion, make sure you're not skewing the numbers with people adding a product they were never thinking about buying.

So what should you be measuring? Unfortunately, there is no single answer as it depends on your goals, but to get smarter about metrics online, one site you should definitely check out is the blog Occam's Razor from Avinash Kaushik. He also has an equally brilliant book called Web Analytics: An Hour A Day that I highly recommend you pick up.

I've been working my way through it since meeting him at a presentation and hearing him speak. His acronym H.I.T.S (How Idiots Track Success) remains one of the more inspired acronyms and one-liners I've heard in a presentation ...

Savvy Aunties And Your Underappreciated Customers

Every good marketing plan I have ever seen has the same piece of critical information to answer the biggest question of all: who is our target market? This is not about creating useless age demographics to segment an audience by what you think you can measure. It is about painting an idea of who the main person is that you want to reach about your product. Let's say it's a mom of a five year old boy. Once you highlight this main customer, your marketing focuses on how to reach them. That's the traditional model.

What if you could, instead, focus on your most underappreciated customer target? The one that none of your customers are chasing. The one that is open to what you're selling, and would love to hear about it, but no one is focused on telling them. For that same five year old boy, let's assume that person is his favourite aunt. The one he loves to see and idolizes. The one without kids who has plenty of money to spend on him, and loves to see him as well.

Thankfully, there is now a site called Savvy Aunties for all those aunties out there, which offers something to the forgotten demographic of women who love kids and have them in their life, but aren't moms. That's an example of focusing on an underappreciated demographic. Of course, their whole site is about these women ... but it does raise an interesting question for you to consider. Who are your savvy aunties, and are you doing enough to reach them?

Buy My Second Book Today (And Save The World)

Ok, before I get into too much trouble - let me explain. Today is the release of a project that I am honored to be involved in, and you could arguably call my second book, though I am sharing author credit with 236 other authors I highly respect. The book is called Age of Conversation 2, and is an exploration of social media and its impact on business. Engagingly subtitled "Why don't they get it?" the book is broken down into 8 key topics:

    * Manifestos
    * Keeping Secrets in the Age of Conversation
    * Moving from Conversation to Action?
    * The Accidental Marketer
    * A New Brand of Creative
    * My Marketing Tragedy
    * Business Model Evolution
    * Life in the Conversation Lane

I chose the "Manifestos" topic for my contribution, because it seemed like a big idea, and also because I knew it would come first in the book so my contribution would be earlier in the mix of over 200 others. That plan clearly worked, because my article titled "The Control Myth: An Inside Look At The Worst Advice In Marketing Today" is on page 5 (I can't help it, I'm a marketer even in a room full of marketers!).

Though I was not part of the first edition of Age of Conversation, that was also a great compilation, and this time around the project is twice the size and has contributions from many authors, bloggers and others that you will definitely recognize. No matter if you are a pro and already understand much of this world, or someone trying to figure it out, I guarantee you will find lots to learn from in this book. And you'll also help a worthy cause as all the proceeds from the book go to benefit Variety, the Children's Charity.

So what are you waiting for? Visit http://stores.lulu.com/ageofconversation and get your copy of Age of Conversation 2 in digital or print format. And flip to page 5 to see my counterintuitive contribution about control and branding. I'll give you a hint ... the future is NOT about giving up control. That's the control myth and in my piece I share the perception shift required to get past it.

Full Author List For Age of Conversation 2:

Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Chris Brown, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Schawbel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Dave Davison, David Armano, David Berkowitz, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne & Todd Cabral, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, John Herrington, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kristin Gorski, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tim Brunelle, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

 

The Softer Side Of Measuring Social Media

How do you measure your social media efforts? How should you? Most people in the industry talk generally about measuring engagement as a concept and cite examples such as time spent on a site or number of comments, or inbound links as ways to track this. Others talk about ad equivalency (ie how much you saved by avoiding paying for advertising to achieve the same results) or even tie social media efforts directly back to sales and conversions. All are good models and we use a combination of these on just about every client engagement.

Today at the Executing Social Media event in Atlanta, I shared a thought that I have been having over the past few weeks about a missing element of measurement that has been surprisingly important to many clients we have worked with. Consider it the "softer" side of social media measurement. Here are a few examples:

Metric: Internal Bragging Rights
Depending on where you work, this can be a big motivator. Being able to talk internally about a new social media effort or innovative marketing program is something that can build reputations of those involved, as well as lead to better internal responsibilities and possibly promotions and other good things.

Metric: Industry Recognition
Recognition from peers is a big deal as well, particularly the higher up in the marketing chain you go. Though some CMOs may not admit it, getting the envy or appreciation from other CMOs is just about the best compliment you can get. This doesn't necessarily need to be about winning some sort of award, just getting industry credit.

Metric: Lessons Learned
Sometimes failures can be the best thing to happen to a social media campaign. Doing something wrong gives you the chance to learn from your mistakes and perhaps even make your next campaign much more successful. The problem is that most metrics would record a campaign like this as having no redeeming qualities. That's not quite true and though most marketers know it, many don't have a way to share it.

Metric: Media Non-Coverage
An obvious numbers-based metric is about volume of coverage but there is a softer side of social media measurement when it comes to media. This could include avoiding negative coverage - for example if there is a journalist seeking brands that "don't get it" and your brand is not on the list because of your efforts. Another similar example might be having your brand's point of view portrayed more accurately as a result of social media content you have online.

Metric: Testimonials
One of the most powerful effects of social media is the testimonials that you often get from customers, employees and just about anyone else. These testimonials provide powerful stories that can be retold within an organization. Even if there is only one great video or a single great blog post, these can take on outsized importance when reported as part of social media measurement for a campaign.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "real" social media metrics we might report don't matter. Only that there may be a softer side of metrics that we too often forget, but that do make a difference.

The 4 Big Problems With Blog Metrics And How To Solve Them

Like most bloggers, I struggle with true metrics for my blog. The problem isn't so much about technology as it is about understanding what is useful to know about my blog to make it better and attract more of an audience. I've got lots of metrics that I can look at today, from my Technorati ranking to where my blog is on the Power150 list. I can check the number of comments I get, or look at the number of daily or monthly impressions. There are several big problems with any of these approaches, though:

1. RSS skews most metrics - When readers are consuming your posts through RSS, most of the time they don't need to visit your site. While this may reduce your page views and monthly visitors, it can often lead to a greater engagement and wider distribution. 
2. Inbound links aren't all equal - Perhaps the greatest injustice of many metrics systems today is that they reward "linkbait listing" (the activity of listing a large number of blogs and links in the hopes those sites will also link back to you). As a result being part of some of these lists, some blogs can be propelled to higher numbers of links and authority without producing any quality content to earn it.
3. Content expires though it may still be relevant - One of the most frustrating things about Technorati as a tool is that it expires older content. There is lots of good content that is getting ignored simply because it was written over six months ago.
4. There are multiple ways to measure engagement - Looking only at links to a post or comments are incomplete measures. People use different sites and different ways to engage with content, from commenting to saving it.

In a sentence, the real challenge for blog metrics is to find a more comprehensive way to see if people are really connecting to the content on your blog. Melanie Baker, the community manager at yet another smart Canadian startup called AideRSS emailed me last week with a very interesting solution to this challenge of measuring "social engagement." They have created a system using what they call "PostRank" to measure the engagement of any individual blog post. Posts are ranked from 1.0 to 10.0 with the top score going to those posts that generate the most activity. Instead of just focusing on inbound links, their ranking system looks measures such as comments, number of saves on del.icio.us, number of Tweets mentioning the URL, and how many Diggs a particular post gets. Then an aggregated score for your blog is calculated based on the individual performance of your blog posts. This is brilliant for a number of reasons:

1. It separates metrics into blog posts instead of one big number. This means that you can get a better sense for which blog posts are really working and driving engagement and which aren't.
2. By allowing you to view your entire blog in terms of your top, best, great and good posts, you can start to spot trends in what content is the most viral.
3. As the name suggests, the site can be used to make your RSS subscriptions more useful by helping you to filter all the posts you get into just the top posts which are the most discussed.

There are only two slight limitations in their model that I can see. The first is that it only looks at a small subset of sites where engagement can happen so some large sites (such as a social network on Ning, or a Facebook group) where there may be lots of discussion can get ignored. The sites AideRSS uses are also very US-centric, which means that significant international discussions could often get ignored. The second limitation is that some of the blog-wide metrics that could complete the picture of blog influence, such as number of RSS subscribers or affiliations of a blogger are missing - so it's not a complete picture of blog influence.

Still, the idea of using PostRank to filter posts and judge the quality of a blog overall is one worth taking a look at. Particularly if it could be easily combined with a tool like Alltop which pulls in RSS feeds by category to make reading blogs and finding the highest quality blogs in a particular category easier.  Any service that can give bloggers a better idea of how to produce higher quality content AND help readers to more effectively decide what content in their flood of RSS subscriptions is most worth reading http://gr.aiderss.com/ should be a big hit.

If you haven't visited this site yet, you need to check it out. A great place to start is with Melanie's blog post where she remixes Viral Garden's list of Top 25 marketing bloggers in order of "social engagement."  Also, in case you're curious, here's what AideRSS came up with as a list of my top ten posts from the last year:

My Top Ten Blog Posts:

Fly Derrie-Air Proves Newspaper Advertising Still Works (Sort Of)

A few weeks ago the Philadelphia Inquirer and a few other local papers in the Philly area launched a very interesting mock advertising campaign for a new airline called "Derrie-Air" which was proposing the revolutionary new business model of charging air passengers based on the combined weight of their luggage and themselves. The site describes what makes Derrie-Air unique: "the magic comes from our one of a kind "Sliding Scale" the more you weigh, the more you'll pay."

We've all been in situations where we could imagine the logic of having a policy like that, but it turns out the campaign was a joke that ordinary consumers could pass along to others, and one from which the newspaper could collect valuable metrics from. The problem with the campaign is that it takes exactly the kind of one sided view the doesn't work anymore. For example, the newspaper ad drove a group of people online from the Philly area, and those people likely emailed the site to friends or blogged about it. Other sites picked up on the campaign and decided to also feature it. I learned about from an email - and found coverage on several advertising and marketing blogs already about it.  If you are reading this now and hadn't heard of the campaign, you just learned about it from a blog.

I am sure the site got great traffic and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the other papers behind it reported these fantastic metrics to advertisers in order to get more of them to buy into the paper. I think real lesson here, however, is that no matter which channel you choose to promote in, they will all be interconnected. For this campaign, newspaper provided the initial surge in traffic, however anything after that would have to be attributed to word of mouth, either online or offline. The irony is that inadvertently, the campaign probably proved how interconnected media really is ... and how clueless some advertisers really are if they believe a pitch that tells them all the visits to this mock site can just be attributed to a few newspaper ads.

Addictomatic Offers The Ultimate Ego Search

If you're among the social media initiated, chances are you are Googling yourself more than once a day. In fact, you probably have Google alerts set up with your own name to notify you (and your ego) whenever anyone mentions you. It's ok, you can admit it. As many of us build our digital profiles and publish content online, seeing who else is talking about us has become more than a voyeuristic thrill ... there is a personal ROI that is rapidly emerging, and it relates to your personal brand.  I have lots of thoughts about personal branding, including something that I'm planning to share very soon which will hopefully be quite useful for any of you trying to build your personal brand.

In the meantime, you might want to check out a site called Addictomatic that I was just referred to by Dave at Rollyo - a site from several years ago that offered the then-unique ability to "roll your own search engine" based on offering search within a selected subset of sites that you could create. Addictomatic is a relatively simple meta search that returns results on a set query from multiple online services. It essentially pulls lots of services through widgets together on the same page - and is not a technically difficult solution ... but I like the way they have positioned it as sort of the super charged personal search. If you want to see what the real buzz is about you, visit the site and type in your name to see who's talking about you on Twitter, videos and photos tagged with your name, who's bookmarked your content on del.icio.us and lots more.  It's ultimate ego search for the ultimate egomaniacs ... bloggers.

Example search for "rohit bhargava":

OSG: The Secret Metric For Measurement Every Marketer Wants

Just over a week ago during lunch at the New Communication Forum, I had a great conversation with Tim Tozer from Radian6 (a social media monitoring service) about the real metrics that marketers are looking for and the increasingly common difficulty of finding metrics that are actually useful and offer actionable insights. Many people who have to contend with web analytics tools today will tell you that it is no longer an issue of having the technology available to measure things online, but rather the analytical ability to hone in on the metrics that really matter. Tradition, when it comes to metrics, is the paralyzing factor because it forces many brands to think about metrics in the same way they always have ... with impressions or clicks and little else. Of course, with social media it becomes much more complicated to decide what to measure as activities may not have a direct relationship with "conversion." The one thing that has remained consistent, though, is the thing that all marketers are really looking for, but many are afraid to admit it. It is something I summed up in the title with a short acronym: OSG.

OSG stands for One Sexy Graphic. OSG means two simple things:

1. Metrics that are easy to analyze and act on
2. Metrics I can show to my boss to explain what I'm doing

If you think about it, smarter metrics comes down to understanding what to measure, but it also requires that we find a smarter way of visualizing data so that it looks appealing and intuitive. During the Web2.0 Expo, there was an interesting exhibit at a party from an artist named Aaron Koblin who has created several of these data visualizations. These were presented as art, but it struck me that his pieces were really what marketers have been longing for. A highly visual representation of complex data in a way that allows you to infer lots of learnings and insights. Perhaps the real need here is something that OSG minimizes through humor ... but the not so revolutionary idea is that we need to rethink the way that we visualize data to focus on true insights rather than what we have traditionally always measured. If a picture is worth a thousand words, OSG can be the difference between proving the effectiveness of a social media effort in a way that people understand, or having lots of numbers in a complex report destined to be ignored by all those who almost read it.

The Top 10 Most Underappreciated Metrics To Track in 2008 - Part II

This post is the continuation of a topic I started yesterday all about the right metrics to focus on and how many marketing teams may be using the wrong ones without realizing it.  In Part I, I shared 10 meaningless metrics that brands should consider moving away from.  Most of those metrics are either based on precedent (what brands have always measured) or ignorance (a lack of knowledge about other metrics to track).  As a whole, the single word that defines the old view of metrics is to focus on impressions.  A more sophisticated model measures engagement or interaction (ie - a more active consumption of content).  Eyeballs are not enough.  So, to help you start thinking outside your typical metrics, here are some of the underappreciated metrics that I believe more brands should focus on in 2008:

1. Inbound Links (from influential sources) - Most marketers right now are already paying attention to inbound links, but the problem with most is that there is no qualitative assessment.  What this means, for example, is that getting included on the blogroll of a spam blog is the equivalent of getting mentioned in a post on a high influence blog.  They are not equal, which is why the Technorati Authority rating made it onto my list of most meaningless metrics yesterday.  Getting smarter about measuring inbound links, however, will be crucial - and this means paying more attention to where that link comes from.
2. Direct URL Access - Do you record how many people get to your site by directly typing in the URL?  This may be the most important ignored metric of all.  The reason is that it tells you volumes about your brand and your marketing if you can find a way to get better at measuring it.  When someone directly types your URL into their browser, it indicates familiarity with your brand, recall of a particular message that made your URL stick in their heads, qualified traffic and a likeliness that they are seeking some piece of information specifically.
3. RSS Subscribers - Most bloggers have already started to pay more attention to how many RSS subscribers they have and even use it as a badge of honor when describing the traffic to their blog.  Aside from being more accurate than inbound links as a measure of influence simply because it is much tougher to accidentally count spam as traffic, this allows you to measure a level of engagement as well.  If someone has chosen to subscribe to your content, that indicates a depth of engagement that a simple page view does not. 
4. Email Link Referrals - We all know that people cut and paste links and forward content to one another, but few marketers pay enough attention to tracking this.  The reason is fairly obvious ... when you get a link coming through from a forwarded email, it is typically impossible to follow.  As a result, it is rarely counted in referring links and ignored as a source of traffic.  Yet, once again, if someone sends a link to your content to someone else, it is likely to indicate a level of engagement that is far higher.
5. Time Spent (engagement) - In my post yesterday, I noted that time spent can be a misleading metric because it can also unintentionally give you credit for having a confusing user interface that takes a long time for a user to navigate (thus inflating your time spent).  This doesn't, however, mean that I think you should ignore the time spent metric altogether.  It still provides a valuable data point, assuming you are confident that you are measuring actual engagement rather than time wasted.
6. Organic Keyword Referrals - Most large brands are getting far more sophisticated with search terms, targeting the popular ones and measuring their response.  Alongside all this paid search marketing, however, users are typing in their own search queries, and arriving at your site organically.  What many brands surprisingly forget to do is fully track and index all the keywords that people are using through organic search to reach their site.  This gives you clues not only to help you focus a search campaign, but also to improve your content.
7. Email Longevity and Multiple Opens - As I shared yesterday, email opens are a useless metric because many emails are opened by accident.  An interesting measure that is underappreciated by many email marketers is how long people keep an email in their inbox and how many times they open it.  If you think about it, the most useful emails that you have gotten are ones that you are likely to keep on file and open at least a few times.  Aside from forwarding an email, which pretty much everyone already measures, keeping track of multiple opens (and particularly the time between opens) can lend interesting insight into how evergreen your emails are.
8. Abandonment - One of the most useful areas to focus on gathering as many metrics as you can is around the idea of abandonment, or the moment when a user leaves your site for any reason.  The types of metrics that could be useful here are time spent before leaving (which may indicate that they arrived at your site by accident if it is only a few seconds), last page viewed (which tells you whether there is a "dead spot" that tends to lose users), or shopping cart behaviour (obviously key to know why people don't complete purchases).
9. Clickstream - The clickstream can mean many things to people depending on how they term their metrics.  what I mean by it are the sites visited directly before and after someone visits your site.  This can tell you volumes if you learn how to read between the lines to what the data is actually telling you.  For example, if people go straight to Google after your site, chances are they are still seeking something they didn't find on your site.  Visiting a competitor site also gives you clues of what other products or services your customers consider.  Finally, when someone is visiting an unrelated site, this may give you a clue about what they thought they might find on your site and perhaps why they left.
10. Microsharing - Of course, regular readers of this blog probably know that I couldn't get through a post like this without making up a new term ... so let's talk about "microsharing."  This is the idea that people are sharing bits of knowledge in lots of ways that don't show up on traditional marketing metrics.  They post a link on Twitter, they bookmark something on del.icio.us, or they add something to Digg.  Each is a social method of sharing information, but brands typically don't track any of these effectively because few feel they have the means to do it.  Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to help brands measure this today. There are conversation tracking tools, and manual analysis is always an option ... but in 2008, this will be something that most smart marketers will be paying a lot more attention to - and more vendors will likely be coming up with easier solutions to help track.

Any other favourite metrics that you would add to this list that you feel marketers have been ignoring and need to focus on in the new year?

The Top 10 Most Overused Metrics of 2007 - Part I

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 ... precedent and ignorance.  Precedent means using the metrics you have always used and is always tempting.  Particularly so when you are encouraged to fill out the same spreadsheets year after year comparing one year's effort to the last.  Effectively, you are locked into a cycle of using crap metrics.  Ignorance is a growing reason, usually as a result of having better tools to measure results, but not taking advantage of them.  Where this leaves us at the end of 2007 is with lots of marketing teams focusing on the wrong metrics and without a plan in sight for changing this in the new year.

When it comes to metrics, the big shift in 2008 for smart marketers will be moving from measuring simple eyeballs or obvious things such as clicks to engagement.  Many have already started.  This post is the first in a two part series meant to highlight some key overused metrics in 2007, and to offer some ideas for better metrics you may want to consider moving into 2008 (tomorrow's post).  These cross the spectrum of metrics on websites to metrics around online advertising, keyword marketing or social media.

Of course, metrics are not a singular thing that can be blindly applied to any campaign.  They depend on the objectives of your marketing and your overall strategy.  Still, hopefully these two posts can give you some thoughts to consider, starting with a few metrics you may want to reconsider focusing on: 

1. Impressions - I have posted before about how impressions are just about the most meaningless metric that brands continue to focus on.  Why?  Because they rarely indicate any kind of action, or even any amount of attention.  Impressions are empty.
2. Technorati Authority - As tempting as it is to use that neat little number beside every blog as the ultimate ranking for a blog, doing so can give you a false idea of the prominence of a blog and unjustly tip the scale against blogs that deserve a higher ranking.
3. Comments - Another element that many people are starting to look at on blogs and online videos is number of comments.  The problem with this is that it fails to qualitatively look at comments.  If you get 5 spam comments, 3 comments calling you an idiot, and another three that are nothing more than linkbait ... that's not 11 comments, that's 0 useful comments.
4. Trackbacks - Trackbacks are like communism, a decent idea in theory that will never work because real people and human nature inconveniently get in the way.  In order for trackbacks to be an accurate measure of links to a piece of content, everyone who links to you would need to send one.  We all know people don't, which makes trackbacks incomplete and useless.
5. Time Spent (searching) - Time spent on a site is a metric that marketers love to use, but it is only partially useful.  Often, the time spent on your site is not an indication of engagement, but rather a result of a poor or confusing user interface.  When a user has to spend 5 minutes trying to figure out your navigation, that's not good news or something to consider a success.
6. Keyword Conversion Rate - When running search marketing, keyword conversion rates are great metrics to point to ... particularly when the percentage conversion is high (10% or more).  The problem is, these rates are usually on low volume niche search terms.  It is a misleading metric that some marketers love to employ to inflate the success of a keyword marketing program.
7. Number of Pages - Another common site measure is number of pages accessed by a user.  Again, looking at this number does not indicate the real interest level or engagement - but rather how many pages a user had to access to find what they were looking for.  More pages is not necessarily a good thing.
8. Email Open Rate - Chances are, if you have conducted any email marketing program, you are measuring open rate and using it as a benchmark value.  The only problem is, many email clients (and the newly redesigned Yahoo Mail client) essentially cause users to automatically open emails simply by hovering over the subject.  This means that accidental opens can be extremely high, even coming from users who are only clicking on the subject line in order to delete your email right away.
9. Popover Click Rate - One of the most common mistakes, this is decreasing in prevalence, but many marketers are still using it as a key metric.  The problem with many popover (rollover) ads is that users struggling to find a close button may inadvertently click your ad.
10. Page Views - No list of useless metrics would be complete without mentioning an old favourite for the online world ... page views.  This is another metric that most forward thinking marketers are getting rid of (or have already) and are replacing it with something like unique views to avoid capturing multiple views from the same person and double counting them.

Check back tomorrow for Part II of this post ... 10 more meaningful metrics to focus on for 2008.