Are you measuring what matters online?

July 27, 2009 · Filed Under Key Performance Indicators, Small & Medium Businesses · Comment 

Measurements matter, especially online, and the internet, through tools such as Google Analytics and a myriad of other devices and applications, we can measure all aspects of a business’s online performance. Through these tools, we can know how many people are looking at exactly what pages of the website, at where did they come from, how many pages of the website did they look at. We can measure what click-through rate there is from our campaigns. We can measure the traffic that was generated and the conversion of that traffic. We have the number of Twitter followers, the number of fans on Facebook, and all sorts of things, but what really matters? Once again, no matter whether we’re talking online numbers or the numbers offline in respect of our business, we need to be focusing on those numbers that really matter in our business. We need to know what is important and then, armed with that information, we can adjust our strategy accordingly.

Particularly, let’s focus on the number of Twitter followers and the number of fans on Facebook. There are many people out there who are unfortunately just trying to garner the largest Twitter follower base or Facebook base or LinkedIn connections, but really what matters is the connections we are having with those people – how engaged are we with those people? We could have 7000 followers, but are only communicating and engaging with a handful, so the number becomes somewhat meaningless. We could have a number of fans of our Facebook page, but they aren’t interacting with us and we aren’t interacting with them, so whilst the number is of some use, we need to be concerned with how many of these followers or friends or connections we are actually engaging with. We need to have loyal friends and fans who are willing to provide word-of-mouth recommendations and engage with others on our behalf – they are the followers we need, and we need to know how many of those we have in our various online communities.

It would be more appropriate to have 50 followers on Twitter who really are enthusiastic about our product or service, than 5000 people who we don’t engage with or are not interested in us. Seth Godin speaks of tribes, garnering people together who are willing to join a community and be actively involved.  We need to remember that a person is only part of a tribe by choice and through active engagement. So accordingly, for our online activities, we need to be engaging with people.

I have seen people talk about the traffic they get to their website, but how much of that traffic is actually being converted into some engaging activity with the business? We need to always remember, whether it is in respect of our offline business or our online activities, to measure what matters, focus on engaging with our community, engaging with our customer base, garnering the connections with the people who are willing to promote and participate in our tribe.

Your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

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