Jim is an international consultant who focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written eight books on using the Internet for marketing, is the Founding President and current Chairman of the Web Analytics Association www.WebAnalyticsAssociation.org and produces the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit www.emetrics.org
- 5 ways to measure social media
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Ahhhhh - Social Media.
Addictive. Fun. Downright social!
But how valuable is it?
How do you tell?There are dozens of reckoning tools online to tally up any and all countable social media elements. Most of them are interesting and some actually useful. Rather than drill down into specifics, let's take a bird's eye view of the types of measurements that might prove useful to the marketing professional.
- 03 September 2009
- Revolt of the Report Monkeys
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"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
You've worked hard to let people in your organization know that there is this great tool called web analytics that can give them great intelligence about the workings of the website, great leaps forward in optimizing campaign ROI and great insight into the hearts and minds of the marketplace. They appear interested, but only a handful reach out to ask for data. And what do they want? Hits reports. You become the person that cranks out reports instead of the person who provides valuable insights.
Adam Hodge, responsible for National Marketing and Communications at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service lays it on the line, "We currently provide a myriad of web effectiveness reports to our Board and I am sure that 90% of them are not really that valuable. However, knowing which 10% to keep and what to discard is the hurdle I face. We have engaged several different external consultants to assist in this task and each and every one has a different (and seemingly logical) take on the issue. This has resulted in what I consider to be management over-reporting."
The less we know, the more time we spend interpreting what meager details we can extract from the systems we run. We started out with precious little log file data about what the Web server was doing and hoped that more data would be more revealing. But now, web analytics tools crank out more reports that can be imagined.
- 28 April 2009
- The Feedback Loop Gap
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Besides being fun to say and a legitimate excuse to wear my "Mind The Gap" hat purchased the last time I was caught in the rain in Covent Garden, the Feedback Loop Gap is the most pernicious problem faced by those in large companies tasked with running large, sophisticated Web sites.
- 28 April 2009
- All Measurement is Personal
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My job is to help companies understand and strategize around the use of web metrics to optimize their marketing. It starts out with measuring the success of a website, moves on to improving specific online customer processes and finishes with analyzing web behavior data to transform the business as a whole.
After explaining the massive multitude of measurements one *could* tabulate, it's time to decide what the organization, department, group or project *should* measure. With so many measurement options, the question is seldom about standards or technologies, but always about goals. What are you trying to accomplish?
- 28 April 2009
- Web Analytics is a Fire Extinguisher
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I was dead wrong about web analytics. I wondered why companies had not invested heavily and speedily in education, training and web analytics tools. Measuring the success of your website is a fundamentally obvious opportunity to blow away the competition. Why would any company not want to set upon a course of continuous improvement? Why would any company turn down the opportunity to get a higher return on their Internet investment? Who would not want to optimize their online marketing and thereby boosting their return on investment?
- 28 April 2009