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More Fun with Metrics

  • Artigo

There are a lot of books out there that talk about the importance of Web metrics. I am constantly sifting through the statistics generated by the various Web properties that I own trying to determine what is interesting to my team and management. The most common metric is page views. But there are page views and then there are the real page views. Most statistic packages differentiate between aggregate views and views. The aggregate views include the traffic generated by bots, short for Web robot and as of today, not in many dictionaries. These bots, aka spiders or crawlers, gather info for rollup sites, MSN search, Google, etc. Do they count or mean anything to us—probably not.

Then there is the metric of unique readers to a site. This is very interesting and maybe a true indicator of the success of the Web page. But the ability to gage this is limited because people like me log on from (potentially) six or more computers. Another, and harder to get, metric is how many people are subscribed to your site. Like magazine subscriptions, this, to me, is the ultimate indicator of a quality reader. Someone who is willing to subscribe to your blog is indeed more than a casual reader.

Michael Thomas Ashby in his blog Mashby sez:

Creating metrics for a blog is a really tough problem. In fact, I haven’t found anyone that has found a clear cut solution regardless of what side of the fence you happen to be on. Fence? Yes, there are two sides to this issue. Some feel that trying to measure the success of a blog can’t be done and that it’s futile to attempt to do so. The other side believe that without metrics, there can be no real understanding of a blog’s success. As the weblog “scale|free” put it, “I think measurement is essential, otherwise all you’ve got is a warm fuzzy story that may actually be completely incorrect.”

About a month ago my general manager challenged me to find a metric that could be translated into a ‘contributing to actual sales' number. I have been thinking about this for a while. Although we don't have the toolset right now to do this, couldn't we extrapolate sales dollars increase vs. number of readers? Would this be statistically interesting? Is there really any correlation? I'm still thinking about this.

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