A New Generation of Smart Metrics?
We just returned from our first annual pilgrimage to the GooglePlex for the Google Partners Summit – a weeklong event for Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs) and Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants (WOACs). The highlight of day one, was the keynote entitled “Crime Against Humanity” by renowned Google web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik.
Much of his presentation centered around the concept that web analytics as we know it is undergoing fundamental, rapid change. He highlighted the limitations of Javascript based analytics tracking in the increasingly fragmented ecosystem of online information consumption.
“The website is no longer the center of the universe,” he said. “In this new world, javascript tracking does not work … Current metrics for web analytics lose their value everyday.”
Marketing & Influencing People is Fundamentally Changing
By example, Avinash pointed to some of the most popular and widely consumed sources for information and online purchasing: Twitter and Amazon.com.
In regards to a book listed for sale on Amazon: How do you measure the value of content publishing on Amazon? At what point is the value of that page maximized? How may reviews are needed before the tipping point is reached upon which many new sales are generated? How do negative reviews affect the value of this page? How will we identify and integrate such influences into our web analytics ecosystem?
And how to measure success on Twitter? Avinash stressed the importance of viewing Twitter as a brand channel. Think the number of followers you have matters – nonsense! One important smart metric that we’re all aware of is the all-important “re-tweet” or RT. Check out Retweetist.com to measure the viral value of your tweets. Then divide the number of RTs per 1K followers to arrive at your RT metric. This metric shows your capacity to influence people!
“Influence not because I did it, but because you did it – that is marketing,” said Avinash.
In regards to your blog, focus on your number of subscribers – what Avinash described as the “future of permission marketing, the future of email marketing.” Another engagement metric is to analyze the number of words in posts versus the number of words in comments.
You’ll notice that many of these metrics aren’t readily available in Google Analytics. For the time being, you’ll need to “automagically pull, scrape, integrate, invent, correlate and compute” to arrive at meaningful behavioral metrics that lead to actionable outcomes. Then set long term goals and continue measure and refine your approach.
The “A” Stands for Agile
It’s clear that web analytics is evolving at lightning speed. Avinash stressed that the smaller shops, not the giants (or elephants in his words) are the ones leading the charge into this brave new world of web analytics. Take a look at companies like statsit.com, percentmobile.com, and brizzly.com for a glimpse of the what the future holds for web analytics.
Cheers to Avinash for a thought-provoking, entertaining and insightful keynote. We can’t wait to dig into his new book, “Web Analytics 2.0” – how about you?
- Josh Lewis
VP Marketing