Don’t Fool Us with Percentage!

My super hero, Avinash Kaushik wrote a wonderful blog last week Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques In that blog, he warned us to avoid using four amigos, common metrics that are misleading and yield little insights. These four pigs are:

• Averages
• Percentage
• Ratios
• Compound Metrics (aka Calculated Metrics)

Well, apparently not everybody gets the memo. Sad! Today I got a marketing email from Omniture titled “MarketingSherpa eMail Summit Special Offer” and in that email, I was asked to learn more about  the benefits of integrating email with Web analytics, specifically,  

how StubHub increased their “revenue per email” by over 2,500% and click-thru rate by over 550%  (Download StubHub Success Story) .

wow, 2,500% and 550%, that will surely get people jump out of windows and sign up for the special offer. But not for waving fans of Avinash’s blog!  

The remedy is simple, just go to look at the raw numbers. Unfortunately that’s not something Omniture is willing to give to me, at least not until I give my all personal information and sign up for the white paper. In this case, privacy is not my main concern because they should have my personal information in their customer database. But enough is enough, I lose my interests–sorry for my short attention span.

One final thought for the email marketing people: if you have customer information already, wouldn’t it be so much nicer that the information can be auto-populated so that users don’t have to fill it again to just get the white paper? Isn’t that a big opportunity to increase lead?

Feel free to share examples like this with us. It will surely make us smarter or at least LOL.

counted counts?

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Einstein

Listen to what the genius said and you will be more comfortable dealing with ambiguity.  Einstein said here can be applied everywhere in our life but probably most appropriate in our field: web analytics. Essentially we are people who are supposed to count everything related to the website: page views, sessions, visitors, on and on. The web 2.0 only adds more of such objects to our list: RSS, video, user generated contents, on and on. This list will never end and as the technology innovates, people’s curiosity will only get bigger and bigger.

So next time when your manager asks you to count for the # of trillions of metrics, be sure you quote what Einstein said. And you and I should really focus on critical few things that can be counted (measurability) and that really count (relevance).

And I am having the job to do to define what those things (read it as KPIs) are for my company.