Are you measuring activity or results?

Forgive me if this sounds like a rant. 

It has suddenly become popular to talk about "measuring engagement" with your audience.  This has become code for "We have no idea how to prove that this is a worthwhile endeavor to your organization's bottom line, so we're going to invent a new metric."

But I'm here to tell you, the Emperor has no clothes.  

One of my favorite clients was reviewing her reports in her web analytics product last year and said to me, "We have 125,000 visits this month, is that good?"  At that moment I had my epiphany.  What mattered was results, not activity.  One could derive some things about their website from that activity, but nobody got paid based around how many visits they get. 

That organization actually had a bottom line need for the website to generate leads, since one in twenty or one in fifty leads creates a five to six figure payday.  Once the head of that organization said that, and said it to all levels of the staff (god bless him) we had our web metric. 

All our activity should be measured in leads generated.  Suddenly we had a way of measuring twitter, facebook, e-mail, everything.  If it didn't generate leads, it was simply activity, and nobody was going to get paid for "activities".

I don't mean to say this stuff is easy.  I work almost exclusively with nonprofits and advocacy groups.  If I had ecommerce clients, we would measure our results in dollars and be done with it.  But the two groups I work with have more subtle goals, and it can create a blind eye of accountability.

But in an organization with insightful leadership you can work through that and get to the real metric you should be measuring.  For nonprofits it's donations or large dollar gift lead prospects.

For advocacy groups it's bill co-sponsorships, which can definitely be influenced by advocates recruited and letters written through the website.  The letter is the activity, the co-sponsorship or floor speech of support is the result.

For grad schools its probably prospective student leads or large dollar gifts.

This week I'm sitting down with my colleagues at Virilion to produce our sample reports as we formalize our metrics practice for clients. They won't be easily copied from client to client, because every client has a different success metric, but that's ok. They'll be truly relevant to each client's success.