The metric you choose communicates to your organization what’s important to you (the POWERFUL person). It communicates to them how their personal success will be measured. That translates directly into what they prioritize when it comes to your digital initiatives.
Choose the right metric and they’ll create the most glorious digital experience in the universe, the perfect acquisition campaign, the most amazing customer service channel. And they will shock you with the profits they deliver.
Choose the wrong one and they’ll create self-serving, sub optimal, non-competitive, tear-inducing outcomes that will, slowly over time, bleed the business to death.
It really is that stark. Simply because it all comes down to the incentives you create.
Don’t believe me?
Let’s look at six corrosive metrics and their angelic twins, which illustrate this challenge – and magnificent opportunity – quite vividly.
1. Page Views vs. Visitor Loyalty
Is there anything easier than measuring Page Views? This metric has been in every tool since we started torturing web server logs to measure hits (!).
What does Page Views measure? It kinda sorta measures consumption. It is hard to know if a lot of Page Views per visit is a good thing (“The visitor loved our site so much that they read 23 pages of content!”) or a bad thing (“Our site is so horrible that it took 23 pages for the visitor to find what they were looking for”) or a horrible thing (“After 23 page hunt the visitor gave up, cursed us, abandoned the site, and went on to tweet to 23,000 followers that we stink”).
When you look at 23 Page Views, how do you know which of the above three was the outcome?
But it gets worse.
Most content sites are currently monetized using display advertising, most commonly on a Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) basis. When you are paid on a CPM basis the incentive is to figure out how to show the most possible ads on every page (“mo ads mo impressions!”) and…. ensure the visitor sees the most possible pages on the site (“mo ads mo impressions mo page views mo money!”).
That incentive removes a focus from the important entity, your customer, and places it on the secondary entity, your advertiser.
It does not take a degree in rocket science to see what happens next. The web is littered with examples of this awfulness.
