Admittedly, web metrics completely overwhelm me. I work in advertising, and yes, metrics are definitely part of my everyday life, but I like to focus more on the creative and production side of things. That said, Kaushik’s breakdown demystifying web metrics helps me wrap my head around all the numbers and objectives.
According to Kaushik, “metrics are a dime a dozen” (source), so it is important to understand the attributes that a great metric should have. Uncomplexity, relevance, timeliness and instant usefulness are the attributes Kaushik recommends zeroing in on to pinpoint your great metrics. (source),
I have worked on a number of different brands from an advertising perspective, but most being personal care products. For the first time, I am working on a soda brand. Though more and more retail sales are moving out of brick and mortar and to the web, food and beverages still are often purchased in the store.
As I scroll through Mountain Dew’s Instagram page, I can’t help but ask myself, “Is this picture of a bottle on top of a cooler really getting someone to stop by their 7-11 to pick up a bottle of Dew?”. “Does the cute pug in a hoodie holding a Kickstart make you jump in your car to pick one up at Duane Reade?”
My dream metric would be to understand if creative posts on social media directly influenced consumers to purchase a product in store…and why!? I understand there are lots of metrics that can infer that during a time period a social campaign launched there was an uptick in sales. With this information you can infer that the social posts were effective in driving purchase. I would like to understand if a specific post (not a month-long campaign) made a direct impact on purchase and why it influenced a consumer to pick up a Mountain Dew.
My dream metric is a combination of both qualitative and quantitative metrics. First, I would like to understand if a post influenced purchase. This can be explained with quantitive information (increase in sales due to a specific social post). As mentioned in the Forbes article, understanding “the Number of leads generated from each social media channel” would be extremely helpful to understand (source). To expand on my dream metric, I would like to understand why the social post influenced a consumer to purchase, which would be a qualitative metric.
Working at a creative advertising agency, we are continually pushed by our clients to improve and optimize our creative, ultimately to sell more product. This dream metric would not only drill down into how a specific creative concept on social media drove purchase, but also would help explain why. This type of information would take the guess work out of coming up with creative concepts and my team would be able to continually optimize creative to its highest potential.
Jennifer Layton 