Any project whether building a new website or planning a campaign starts with a basic question. We can talk about goals and audiences, but simply put, What is Success? How will the organization, key stakeholders, etc measure the success of an initiative. The idea of ROI (Return On Investment) is thrown about and is vital to be able to quantify. But before you should even dig into that, you should be able to simply answer the success question. Once that is determined, you can start down the path of a more quantitative examination of how it can be measured.
There are many different metrics that can be used to provide quantitative results. Historically, people were enamored by hits, unique visits, and length of visit. While these are good indicators of interest, it doesn’t get you all the way there.
The reality is that to get the whole picture, you need to look at the whole picture. There is a fluidity to all of this that needs to be analyzed to understand not just what is working, but what additional actions to take. For me, analysis is a tool for the future, not for the past. A piece I read recently got me thinking about this subject and how to better examine analysis in terms of Integrated Path Analysis (http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/14164.asp). This concept looks at the user flow from the source through conversion. Many people get hung up on the idea that if you are not selling things, it is hard to track conversions. Going full circle, I go back to the question, What is Success? If you have answered that you can then approach it in some simple steps:
- Define success metrics
- Identify desired user paths
- Apply proper tools and techniques to capture useful data
Okay, so that is pretty simplified, but it would be a much longer post if I didn’t just stay high-level.