Avinash Kaushik brought back some good stuff from London last week - bottled up in his latest post over at Occam’s Razor. 

1) Engagement metric - How is your site doing vs. Customer Expectations.

According to Avinash people now regularly expect "more" than what their website experience (on your site?) delivers:

‘Early in your existence (or when the Internet started) the red line was lower, websites had very robust / delightful capabilities that were way ahead of customer expectations (maybe they were not quite as savvy or they did not care). But as the web has evolved and our customers have become increasingly sophisticated the slope of the yellow line (customer expectations) has a much steeper gradient.

Another thing Avinash picked out of the same presentation - Persona’s are important and some are more important to you than others and that value can be calculated (much as I have calculated the value of a page for some of my clients).

"…I am not sure how Value is computed but you can use Profitability or Customer Loyalty or Net Promoter or Least Likely to Switch (in case of phone company) or Most Amount Spent on Add-on Services or other such metrics. Pick the one that makes most sense for your company."

Avinash pulled from another presentation to highlight cross channel conversions - including offline conversions (How can we measure success in a non-line customer experience world? Tough questions with evolving answers), similar to my example in Measuring Multi Channel Marketing - an open question to the Web Metrics Community of Talladega Nights.

 "…We execute marketing programs and measure effectiveness as if the process is linear. But in reality as the red, green and purple lines indicate customer behavior is very different and we are not very well set-up to measure effectiveness. If you come to the website (the red line above), read reviews, go to the store, look and touch the products, talk to the sales person who totally wow’s you and you go and buy the product (all in one day). Who gets the credit? Your Google PPC program? What if your path was the one shown by the green arrows? Off-line then online then offline then online?

Avinash has been saying for some time that Clickstream data alone, is not enough to measure conversions - and he continues that line of reasoning here:

"…This is all the more reason that your core web success measurement strategy can’t rest on the bedrock of clickstream data, if it was not already limiting before it is very much so now. Taking steps to incorporate other measurement sources such as surveys or remote usability or market research or collecting information via registration etc are going to be critical. And who knows that else is around the corner. [Qualitative data. Survey Best Practices.]"

I would read Avinash’s entire post a couple of times over - and download the presentations.