Fuzzy Metrics Lead to Problems – Not Profits
As marketing professionals, it is one of our core responsibilities to measure our success. Right?
My colleague and friend, John Reese, once taught me that Internet marketers only need to measure two things: YES or NO? and MORE or LESS? I now call these two measurements the core duality metrics.
Pretty simple, eh? Uh … not so much.
It’s true that you can only improve what you measure, but your measurements or “metrics” as we call it at MarketingOnline.com members call it, must be clear, specific and actionable in order to lead to improvements and profits.
Brent Dykes of Digital Marketing blog writes:
“A big problem with some metrics is that they are not specific, clear/intuitive, or actionable. We say “garbage in, garbage out” when it comes to data collection and reporting.
Similarly, fuzzy metrics lead to weak adoption, poor decision-making, and frequently inaction. If your metrics are nebulous or unclear, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and your company.”
He further writes that one of his least favorite metrics is traffic. And he’s right because whenever I hear one of my Internet marketing students ask me how to measure “traffic,” I really need them to be more specific.
Traffic could mean page views, visits, daily unique visitors, monthly unique visitors, visitor value, etc. My starting point is always Visitor Values because I typically have marketing and e-commerce sites for which I need to measure dollars, not just visitors.
The fastest, easiest and most economical ($0) tool I’ve created to measure visitor values is my VPV Calculator. It’s yours as my gift for simply reading this far into this post 😉
What To Do Next?
Visit and download my VPV Calculator, then comment and share this post with your friends and colleagues who want to get clearer about how to measure the value of their website traffic.
