Measuring Web 2.0 - Less Can Be Worth More

Marketing Sherpa had a great post from Judah Phillips today: "Measuring Web 2.0: How to Promote the Features that Get the Best ROI" which includes a 5-step outline to get you started:

1. Identify unique online actions that show user engagement


2. Refine Web analytics system to capture event data


3. Create metrics to score visitor activity


4. Track “event streams” along with clickstreams


5. Mine event data for optimization and upsell opportunities

Although this is a good start I think it's important to point out that what you should be measuring depends on your business objective. In Google's case they had fewer ratings in the Nielsen/NetRatings website popularity gauge but still made more money than any other website.

I don't know about you but page views and click throughs always fell short of answering my most important questions: how many of my visitors are getting the information they want and more importantly; am I driving the right kind of visitors to my site?

If you’ve got a blog or wiki, maybe web analytics isn’t nearly as important as comments or user input. If you’ve got a forum, it's all about the number of posts per day. What it comes down to is that web analytics need to be customized for each campaign or website. That’s going to take a lot more work up front, but hey, if good marketing was easy, anybody could do it.