Another speaker at the Multichannel metrics session at SES was Jason Burby of Zaaz who talked about focusing on visitor behavior and cautioning not get cought up in the tons of data that we now routinely must deal with.   And there will only be more and more data as time goes and and people want more metrics.

"if your optimizing your site for search and your get 30% of your traffic from search engines then your not optimizing for the rest of your visitors, the other 70%".   "What happens when the person who came from a search engine to the site comes back again to the home page"?

Jason also believes in layering data from 3 different sources, attitudinal (surveys), behavioral (analytics) and competitive (Hitwise, Net-Ratings, etc) and merging those into one view that you can operate with.

There seemed to a difference in opinion on what constitutes a valid KPI between Jason and Eric.  Eric believes a Key Performance indicator should be a percentage or ration while Jason things it can be a number also.

Everyone in this Multi-Metrics channel agreed that you need to start small and that finding the right analytics requires a very precise understanding of a company’s requirements (something that companies often have not thought out that clearly).