Web analytics, web metrics, and how to use them to track and improve conversions

I'm a subscriber to Mike Moran's Biznology newsletter - the one just published for December 06 is pretty detailed about Web Metrics Measurements - pretty good read.  Here's what stood out to me and what my thoughts about it are:

"...If Web metrics makes your brain hurt, don't worry. We can simplify things for clarity. If we end up oversimplifying things a bit, that's the price you pay. As mathematician John von Neuman observed, "There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."

I don't believe anyone has Web Analytics "nailed down" - there's imprecision in just about any metric.  Kinda weird - we have the ability to record everything that happens on a page - on a site - yet - we often can't get all the numbers we want and the data we can pull can be interpreted in a number of different ways. 

Mike goes on to put forward basic measurements - and we can't even agree on that:

"....Did they see it? The first thing we want to know is if our content was viewed by the customer. Was the ad shown? Was the e-mail seen? Was the blog post viewed? We call this measurement the impression.

Did they choose it? If seen, was it acted upon? Did they click on our message to go deeper? This one is called the selection. (Because AJAX user interfaces allow selections without clicks, we shouldn't call this a click through, although usually selection is done by clicking.)

Did they do it? What did we want the customer to do? Buy something? Fill out a contact form? Call our toll-free number? This metric is called the conversion".

First of all, most of the packages I've been working with .....there's no "They" - there's a bunch of clicks - but you don't know who people are behind that.  You can tell how many of those that click on ad or link on a page - but as Mike Moran points out, with AJAX and Flash ....it's hard to even know that.   What they did...you can probably figure out (if you can record it).  So at best - even the simple thing that any story should have (who, what, where, when and why) is very difficult to answer with Web Analytics.

However, with good web structure and design - you could segment your site a head of time - make sure only the people who are interested in an offer - see the offer (by making them click to it - not sticking it on the homepage). 

The problem here ....... we are asked to measure promotions already existing - when no thought was given to how to present the information in a way that allows us to collect the information we want- one reason why Web Analytics is imprecise.  We have to make some educated "guesses" in cases like that.

It's good that "web beacons" was mentioned - I never knew that was the name of a single pixel transparent image as defined by IAB.

Then we get into RSS Subscriber measurement

"....Some metrics experts suggest that you send short excerpts of your blog posts in your blog feed, rather than the full posts. Doing so makes it easy to count impressions of the full post, because customers click through to your Web site to read it, thus making it as easy to count as any other Web page view. But many usability experts decry this practice because customers prefer to read everything in their feed readers, without bouncing back and forth to your Web site. Don't annoy your customers just to solve a measurement problem—just accept that blog feed impression counts are not terribly precise. Until something better comes along, we can make the simplifying assumption that the impressions of your blog posts in blog readers are equal to your number of subscribers."

That's an area of contention right now.  I'm of the mind you should put the entire post in your feed than a portion of it....I'm also annoyed at having to take that action - click on a link to see the rest of the post.   I don't know about counting the number of impressions of your blog posts as the number of subscribers. 

Blogs are a different entity than a normal web page - for one thing - people come back more often (if they like the blog) and they can click on multiple posts during the same session -and in most cases ...they do that.  I would not go with blog post impressions as a measure of anything except that people are looking at the post.

As far as subscribers - FeedBurner is still your best bet - but if you don't use FeedBurner AND you use XML readers like Google Reader - and your entire post is in the XML feed - I don't see how your metrics will pick up that you post was seen.  In other words - your screwed both ways - because ...

- if you use FeedBurner AND the whole post is in the feed - you read the post (or not - your reader gets it anyway ...maybe from Google - maybe cached - so you don't know how many times Google fetches the actual feed ...maybe only once) without clicking on anything ...so what does FeedBurner know about how many subscribers are reading the post?  Nothing much.

- if you don't use FeedBurner and your post shows up in Google Reader ...and you click on it go to the site - yes - you know there's a visit - but you don't know for sure if the visit was a subscriber.

Your screwed both ways ...... the best thing you can do is take two aspirin's, look at FeedBurner's estimated subscribers for your blog and up the number by about 20% to 50%..... how's that for precision.

Read the rest of Mike Moran's December Newsletter here.  To end this post - there's no Unified Field Theory of Web Metics and now you know why.