Why metrics suck – Seb Chan, MW2008 Day 2

Attended Seb's talk today about metrics. Points and my interpretations:

• Start with asking why do we have a website?
  
• We want to engage audiences – but how
  
• Need to build metrics for each reason
  
• Metrics don't calculate return on investment (ROI)
  
• People don't come in through the front page, come via Google which has changed the way that people can search (see example of search for Powerhouse Museum) – there is a basic search problem here
  
• Lot of metrics that measure time spent often used to buy ads on commercial sites
  
• Need to track email users – what links do they click on, what are the read rates, asked how are museums segmenting their audiences? (only 2 did!)
  
• When developing email campaigns need to think about how you're going to track subscribers – should be segmenting them too
  
• Reinvigorate – a view of the site in real time
  
• AttentionMeter – compares different counting systems (I think? Got lost at this point...)
  
• Compete is another comparison site
  
• Hitwise actually gives more data than I was looking at each month
  
• Flickr commons measures – how many people favourite them and how many tags, how many "sensible" comments
  
• egosurf – fun site to see how popular you are!!
  
• Citation analyser – Domain Tools
  

Also refer to the post I did on measuring "online" success. I'm still unconvinced as I think we need to do more talking to people – when we evaluated educational websites, museum sites that we thought were good the students often hated! Seb did state that while we need to do qualitative research we need to segment the audiences first – I'm still not sure about this...