Good Read: Drake Morton
In Search Of The Golden Metric
by Dave Carpenter , Friday, June 24, 2011
“We know our digital advertising works,” a client recently said, “because when we stop running it, our site traffic and revenue drop.”  His company spends over $100 million each year on digital advertising; they are sophisticated marketers who want to use data to improve results. If you ask him what the stacks of reports on site traffic, ad impressions, etc. he gets actually tell him, he’ll tell you, “not much.” Why? Because he and most digital marketers are accountable for getting results, they want specific, actionable information — what to run with and what to change — about creative, site and page placements, position, size, frequency, and other factors they can control.
Measuring web sites and online marketing campaigns has kept marketers, agencies, and others busy for years. Web analytics report visits, page views, visits and other counts of site activity. Ad server analytics report impressions served, clickthroughs and other silo-specific measures.  Once upon a time, each delivered the “hot metric.” But, as soon as we begin to understand what each “hot metric” tells us, we begin to understand where it falls short, and we begin again to search for the “Golden Metric” that we can confidently use. (more…)