A recent eMarketer article asked Is the Click Still King? To the average user, there are so many ways to engage with a site. So you would think that there would be more relevant and prevalent ways of measuring success. But take a look at the top methods that both the CMO Council and Chief Marketer respondents indicated were important:
Click-throughs and website views. How very 1999.
Although, I will give the CMO Council the edge on this one, with looking at registrations, which tells you a little bit about actions taken and level of commitment to engage. That's a positive thing. But it seems like we're still treating the Web like a version of television, where "eyeballs" are what's important.
Take a look farther down those charts and see some of the interesting ways of measuring success: content download, transactions, engagement (which is a little vague), and increased knowledge. Those are all methods of demonstrating effectiveness that can determine your content strategy and marketing channels moving forward. But ultimately, each time a campaign is launched, the methodology for measurement needs to be customized to the goal at hand. Click-throughs and hits are not a universal metric for every campaign.
Some metrics that might appeal to me as a marketer include:
- Likelihood of a customer to become an advocate for my brand
- The spread of information across the Web - especially via social tools
- Sentiment of comments generated by a post or campaign
- Effective integration of offline calls to action and online actions
These are just a handful of suggestions for different types of measurement. As I said, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. What are some unique and different measurement standards that you've seen evolving?
Photo credit: raneko (Flickr)
