Eric Peterson of www.WebAnalyticsDemystified.com and Revenue Sciences spoke last.

"Key Performance Indicators, or KPI’s, are a response to data overload"  Businesses are overwhelmed with data but much of it is not actionable.   In fact, Eric believes you can’t take  data from page logging analytics and get actionable data (that would be most of your low end analytics packages).

"Web Analytics data is deep but general while KPI’s are shallow but much more actionable", according to Eric.  You need to put data in context (where you are today and where you were last month, ie) and KPI’s are always ratios or percentages.

"More often than not you want to communicate to upper management that things are bad rather than things are good".  If you communicate that there’s a problem and it’s serious enough - you’ll get the funding to deal with the problem.  If your giving good news often it’s not responded to.

"You also need to define what happens when your KPI goes up by 10% and when it goes down by 10%"; if you don’t know who to call, or who’s job is on the line when this change happens, you probably don’t have an actionable KPI.

Another point Eric Peterson made is KPI’s are usually not multi-channel; you can have different KPI’s for each channel, but should not share the same KPI for all your channels.

Depending on your site and what your trying to measure, important KPI’s might differ; for example, one of the most important KPI’s for a commerce site is the average time it takes to respond to an email.

The Multi-Channel Metrics session ended with a couple of questions regarding what the best analytics package for layering of data.  Not one really could answer that question as it really depends on what the client want to accomplish.  Anything done with layering metrics data from multi channels and types is going to be expensive and customized.