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.

web metrics illusion?

According to Tim Ambler, “Marketing metrics create the illusion of certainty and control. Cannabis has much the same effect. ”

I’m afraid web metrics too create the illusion of certainty and control. As web analyst, we are obsessed by all kinds of metrics and dashboards. But to some extends, we have to admit even we could have all possible data under heaven, there are still things that we can’t figure it out. And 90% of time we think we are right, we are actually wrong. The reason is we are dealing with people, not data. Let’s keep the people element in our mind when creating metrics and dashboards.

P.S. note on Tim Ambler. Never heard of him before, but he is the professor in London Business School and according to this page, he is an expert in the following area: