I read about the Actionable Metrics Report from AvenueA-Razorfish on Andy Beal's blog - downloaded the Actionable Metrics Report to take a closer look since my focus is Metrics and Search Engines.

And what I found was some pretty good stuff - reminds me of a project I'm working on - but the resources to do this kind of reporting in the Actionable Metrics Report is beyond any single analyst to do well - it's much more of an "agency" boutique report.

It's kinda hard for me to pull the graphics out of the report - I'll just talk about the Actionable Metrics Report findings.

On page 6 it's shown that US Marketers are taking the most advertising away from Magazines, Direct Mail and Newspaper Advertising to put into Online Advertising.  Funding for Print Classifieds and Yellow pages are affected the least with this online advertising trend.

Page 8 has a pretty cool chart indicating Brand Advertising impressions are effective to converting visitors to buyers - but only at a certain frequency - if they're shown too much - people get sick of it and don't act the way you want them to.

It's been thought that running Display Ads along with your search marketing will give your Brand a lift and higher conversions - and that certainly seems to be the case on page 12 where running Display Ads along with Paid Search lifted Paid Search Conversion rates by 80% (but you have to be careful about such numbers - your results will probably not match the numbers in the Actionable Metrics Report unless you execute your campaigns in the same way Avenue A does).

On page 12 (actually - it says page 9 on the bottom of the report - but page 12 at the bottom of the browser) it's shown that online display advertising does impact Television Advertising by providing a 69% lift to the brand when your running both at the same time.

On page 15 it's shown that Multiple Media Exposures does impact conversions - in other words, conversion can be thought of as a continuum with 40% of the conversion process happening prior to the last thing that's seen before converting (IE: the last form seen before you sign up for something that's considered a conversion).  Basically, you can't put all the credit on a conversion from what is seen just before the conversion - maybe it's a page or series of pages seen before the final page before conversion that does the trick.

On page 21 Web Analytics tools are not up to the job of holistic media measurement (the kind of stuff I've been asked to do on and have pulled my hair out on from time to time - nuff said).

Page 24 focuses on Rich Media Application tracking using web analytics and the key takeaway is that RIA it too complicated to measure with standard web analytics packages (I can say that's true based on my own personal experience).  As RI A's are often used for Brand Building and Brand Awareness - the Analytics package needs to have metrics that match - and they don't - therefore, measuring RIA properly is almost impossible without a custom build Analytics tracking solution.

I like the chart on page 26 of the report showing the Elements and Measurement of Brand Engagement - so I've reproduced it below:

The chart shows how you can build an "Engagement Score" but you can see many of the Metrics needed for this process are not supplied directly by Web Analytics - many are derived and interpretive - with is sorta inexact.  Engagement is altered from page to page and within a page  - but some of the metrics you need for the charts on page 27 are hard to pull and sometimes, impossible to get - depends on the page and technology used.

The rest of the Actionable Metrics Report from AvenueA-Razorfish is quite good and worth a close read.