Avinash Kaushik had a great post this morning about the different types of keywords visitors use to reach your site, what their intentions are, and how to measure keyword effectiveness based on where customers are in the sales funnel.  This got me thinking about metrics in general.  I often hear people complain that they are not getting enough hits to their website (which is a very outdated metric in any case).  But when you ask them what goal/objective they are trying to measure, they usually cannot tie the two together.

From both a business and sanity point of view, it is imperative that you use metrics that will give you the information you need.  For example, if you are trying to measure whether or not your website is giving you leads, the number of hits isn’t the right number.  You need a way to collect leads from your website, or some way to tell if people were there (an offer unique to the website) to measure lead generation from your website.

So before you start pouring over your web and advertising statistics, take a moment to figure out exactly what it is that you’re trying to find out.  Then decide what metric will help you answer that question.  Matching up metrics and goals/questions/objectives will give you much more reliable informaton – saving time and resources and allowing you to focus on efforts that are actually working for your business.

(photo by aussiegall @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: analytics, statistics, internet marketing, metrics, business, marketing