Paul Cook on E-consultancy:
I must confess that I do find programmes like the apprentice and Dragon’s Den both entertaining and a good reminder that businesses need to be built on sound principles.So I was shocked a few weeks ago when the panel got particularly excited about a poker affiliate website that had attracted 50,000 hits. Not one panel member asked over what period this virtually meaningless metric had been counted, let alone how many people that equated to and whether any of them had signed up on poker sites. It seems funny that 10 years on people are still willing to go on prime time television and talk about measuring a website in terms of hits.However, despite the fact that it cannot be done for flash sites people have still been happy to measure website popularity in terms of pages. However, the problem remains that if you redesign your site your page impression figures will be completely irrelevant and so it follows that they don’t give the best answer when trying to evaluate which of two sites is the most popular. However, the arrival of Web 2.0 will change everything.Web 2.0 allows designers to present sites in a far more synchronous way. Whilst the user accesses the page relevant content that might be needed is constantly being requested from the server. The result is a page impression that lasts for minutes and that is generating a constant stream of hits.The solution to all of this is to accept that web is an active media that has more in common with TV and radio than it does with newspapers.
I must confess that I do find programmes like the apprentice and Dragon’s Den both entertaining and a good reminder that businesses need to be built on sound principles.
So I was shocked a few weeks ago when the panel got particularly excited about a poker affiliate website that had attracted 50,000 hits. Not one panel member asked over what period this virtually meaningless metric had been counted, let alone how many people that equated to and whether any of them had signed up on poker sites.
It seems funny that 10 years on people are still willing to go on prime time television and talk about measuring a website in terms of hits.
However, despite the fact that it cannot be done for flash sites people have still been happy to measure website popularity in terms of pages. However, the problem remains that if you redesign your site your page impression figures will be completely irrelevant and so it follows that they don’t give the best answer when trying to evaluate which of two sites is the most popular. However, the arrival of Web 2.0 will change everything.
Web 2.0 allows designers to present sites in a far more synchronous way. Whilst the user accesses the page relevant content that might be needed is constantly being requested from the server. The result is a page impression that lasts for minutes and that is generating a constant stream of hits.
The solution to all of this is to accept that web is an active media that has more in common with TV and radio than it does with newspapers.
Ashley Friedlein has some thoughts of his own:
Can we really use the number of MySpace friends a brand has as a useful metric for success in engaging customers? How should be measuring ‘engagement’?My own feeling is that the usual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should still apply, be they ‘hard metrics’ like sales, clicks, conversion rates, or ‘softer metrics’ like brand favourability, purchase intent. Engagement metrics need to be understood in terms of how well they contribute to delivering these KPIs, rather than be seen as the KPIs themselves.
Can we really use the number of MySpace friends a brand has as a useful metric for success in engaging customers? How should be measuring ‘engagement’?
My own feeling is that the usual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should still apply, be they ‘hard metrics’ like sales, clicks, conversion rates, or ‘softer metrics’ like brand favourability, purchase intent. Engagement metrics need to be understood in terms of how well they contribute to delivering these KPIs, rather than be seen as the KPIs themselves.
Robin Grant
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 02 Jun 2009
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