Blogger, author and former Google Evangelist for Analytics, Avinash Kaushik is always inspiring.  If we ever get frustrated with Web Analytics, a perusal of Avinashs’ blog serves as a reminder of why we try to derive actionable insight from Web analytics data at all.  Avinash pushes us to think outside the box and expect more from ourselves and our analytics solutions.

Avinash chose not to take this opportunity to promote his new book, instead he set out with the dual purposes of venting and inspiring, as was requested of him via the GAAC forum.

New metrics

The key message I took from this session was that our traditional metrics (visitors, visits, pageviews etc.) give us a very limited view of the impact of our web content. This is because content is often redistributed across platforms, on-site, via RSS, tweets and retweets.

Avinash encouraged us to develop a new mental model to reflect this.  The reach and velocity of metrics are the future of Web Analytics.

Measuring Twitter

Some expensive analytics tools claim to measure twitter by providing:

• the number of followers a tweeter has, and
• the number of tweets they post

One may have many followers and may post regularly, but any measurement of the reach of a tweeter is not complete unless you consider the prevalence of retweets.  Extensive retweeting indicates that followers are highly engaged, and spreads a message beyond the direct followers.

Marketing is changing dramatically. Avinash suggests this is because the channels of influence are changing.  The amplification of any message sent out is more relevant than the number of followers to whom a message is originally directed.  Avinash suggests a suitable metric to measure your success on twitter is

“the number of retweets per thousand followers.”

Measuring a blog

For a blog, the number of subscribers, rather than the number of visits, is a better measure of success: subscriptions are the ultimate in permission marketing.  Once a visitor subscribes we have permission to push our messages out to them at will. 

• The number of comments per blog post, plus
• the standard deviation of the number of comments

equals a measure of how much conversation the blog is generating, which is a far more effective metric than visits — that just measures how loud we are shouting, not how effective our message is.

The excitement continues

As if Avinash didn’t cause enough excitement, there was Kobe beef and Fois Gras for lunch, and trampoline dodge ball and bounce rate jokes in the evening –I really shouldn’t find them so funny….