Resources for Faking Your Way Through Social Media Metrics
April 14, 2009 :: Joe LoongOne of the many things I know I need to work on is getting better at Web metrics and analytics — both understanding them, and presenting them.
I’m trying, really I am. Part of the problem is that any liberal arts major can look at a chart (or worse, make one) and draw completely specious, unwarranted, and often contradictory conclusions. Or rationalize around numbers we don’t like: “Have we accounted for seasonality?” “It’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison.” “True, pageviews are low, but we’re targeting influencers.” “The numbers we can collect don’t capture the true impact.”
Actually, those last two sound a lot like last week’s “The ROI for Social Media Is Zero” by Augustine Fou [link via @MaddieGrant], which reads a lot to me like an apologia for social media metrics, though it’s more of an indictment of traditional media marketing metrics.
On the other side (well, on another side), is Geoff Livingston’s “Thoughts on Measurement,” which says that social media measurement isn’t that hard, if you start by looking at a strategy’s desired result, which informs the type of metric to use, which implies the tools needed.
It’s all very confusing. It’s handy to have a few metrics aphorisms to whip out when you get into trouble, including grumbling “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” “correlation is not causation,” and the whole, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Getting beyond the aphorisms, I’m going to list out a few Web resources that I’m tracking in an effort to bone up a little more on Web metrics and analytics. This is by no means a comprehensive list, so if you’ve got your own resources that you’ve found useful, leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list:
* KD Paine’s PR Measurement Blog – I was first introduced to KD at 2008 Blog Potomac conference. Her book, Measuring Public Relationships, had just come out, and though I didn’t get it then, I have it now and I’m catching up.
Her blogroll and sidebar are chock full of other resources to check out, and you could probably do worse than running down the list.
* Measuring Success, the Web site for the book by Brian Clifton — I came across this site after searching on a question about Google Analytics.
* Speaking of which — whatever tools you’re using, read the help resources, docs, and other learning guides (Google Analytics has Conversion University, for example) –basically, RFTM.
* Trending Upward — this blog is targeted towards analytics in higher education, but there’s good primer material on all sorts of Web metrics stuff.
* Social Science Statistics Blog — this one is way, way in the weeds and thus over my head [to mix my metaphors], but I’ve known since the 2007 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media that I need to bone up on my knowledge of statistics. At the very least, I’m trying to get to the point where I can ask better questions after reading, say, the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project report.
Anyway, like I said, this is just a short list of resources I’ve added to my feedreader to try to get better at applying analytics. If you’ve got your own suggestions, please share in the comments.
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