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.

Dell Implemented Omniture SiteCatalyst

Dell is no stranger to the web analytics. Since the inception of dell.com in 1996, we have been collecting and analyzing dell.com Web traffic data. And since 2003, we’ve used a global internal IT system to  continuously improve the user experience and drive online sales.

But yesterday marked an important milestone in our web analytics history and probably my career as well. We finally implemented Omniture Sitecatalyst across business segments and units. This is significant for several reasons:

1. Democratization of online data – By getting more information about what’s happening on our site into the hands of more talented Dell marketers, we will generate more awareness, discussion and insight about what’s working and what’s not working on the site.
2. Increase in number of testing ideas – Testing is one of the most powerful tools we have for tuning the site based on customer behavior. With easier access to information about what customers are doing on the site, we expect more testing hypotheses to be generated that will flow into the MVT testing roadmaps in various segments around the world.
3. Global Metrics Standardization – Over the years, different segments around the world have created their own reporting silo’s and metrics, making it almost impossible to compare performance around the world. With the release of Omniture SiteCatalyst, we are standardizing web metrics globally for Dell. Being able to compare apples to apples around the world will help us extend best practices around the world and measure impact of changes globally.

So personally I am excited. But I am also aware that Sitecatalyst is no panacea no matter how good it is. I am a firm believer of Avinash’s trinity strategy and I think we are far away from integrating clickstream, outcomes and experiences data together to drive holistic, insightful and actionable recommendations. But I feel that we are on the right direction and I am proud to be a member of this movement in the company.