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Dec
28
2009

Best of 2009: Setting Metrics to Measure Without a Goal is a Recipe for Running in Circles

By | Best Of

2 Comments

hamsterHaundreisWe’ve come to the end of another year, so we’re highlighting some of the year’s best posts… (originally posted October 1, 2009)
How many pageviews should my blog be getting?  How many followers should I have on Twitter?  What retweet percentage should I be shooting for?  All of these are good metrics to take a look at, but without a goal in mind, you may find yourself running in circles.

Metrics help measuring progress.  To know how you’re doing.  They can be extremely useful to know how well your marketing campaigns are doing or how well your social media strategy is playing out.  But if you don’t have a goal in mind, you may find yourself spending time and money on actions that don’t really matter to that goal.

For example, if you goal is to increase sales on your online store by 5% this quarter, what metrics should you measure?  Obviously the number of sales and conversions on the website itself.  But what are you doing on your blog or social media to help increase sales?  How can you measure that?  Starting with the goal first helps you build a strategy to reach that goal and to understand the proper metrics to look at to see how you’re doing.

If you start on the metrics side, say how many Twitter followers you have and how much that increases every month, you may get a feeling for how your online influence is growing (maybe), but how do those metrics tie in with your goal?  By focusing on metric first, you may spend way too much time trying to attract new followers and following people in hopes that they’ll follow you.  A greater following may help you reach the goal of increasing sales, but you need to figure out how to measure that.

In the case of Twitter, how do measure what we do there with reaching the sales goal?  Well, people are usually going to follow and retweet you if you provide useful information, not spam them with marketing.  But if you provide useful information and people come to trust you, it’s usually ok to put in a few words about your products from time to time (maybe a specific promotion).  If you lead people from Twitter to a specific landing page on your online store, it’ll help you measure what you do on Twitter with how it helps sales on your store.

This is just one example of how starting with a goal can help you plan actions online and how to measure them, but I hope you’ve found it useful.  I’d love to hear your stories about how you use social media and the Internet to drive business goals.

(photo by Haundreis @ Flickr CC)

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  • learjet

    Hi Sara,

    I did a little study on driving traffic from Twitter to your website and forgot about it until I read your article, your points were excellent. I posted 7 Tweets and tracked the links over an 11 month period. Those 7 tweets ended up generating 389 clicks, not a huge amount of traffic but it was amazing how much traffic come from so little work. I put screen captures from my tracking program and tips that your users will find helpful here: http://www.totalinfotech.com/blog/28-michigan-w…

    Thank you for taking the time to write your articles, I read every one!

    Happy New Year!

    Respectfully,
    Earl Lear

  • http://sazbean.com sazbean

    Earl, Thanks for the link and info. We get a bit of traffic from Twitter too, so it's interesting to see it in terms of metrics. Maybe I'll try to put together my own post after the holidays. Thanks for the comment and for reading!