I’ve never quite been able to work out why certain bloggers hate the idea of metrics so much. My gut reaction is to dismiss anything that denigrates customers to a spreadsheet of facts and figures. But, I’m also intrigued as to why people do what on a site and the extrapolation of said data.
I’m personally obsessed with my Tinbasher referrals – especially those for “how to get rid of the wife” (fifth one down). I’m also obsessed with where people are coming from, how long they’re stopping for and whether they’ve had a worthwhile experience. When you pour more than your fair share of blood, sweat and tears into something, you like to know whether it’s worth the extra plasma or a salt tablet.
With blogs you get a response from those who really are engaged in your content. And there is no finer feeling. The content I care about or take most time over is the content I am most pleased to get feedback on. And the stuff that I throw up there without a moment’s thought I monetize at roughly 0.23 cents per click through. 
But, just to clarify, it’s a b2b/b2c blog that generates leads. Adsense I experiment with on a few posts and it happens to pay my cable bill.
And I suppose I answer my own question with regards to the measurement of metrics here. If you care about what you’re selling and your business – you know, if you really invest more than money in it, then you will care about every single aspect of its growth and development and will use every single tool available – like your own child. If you’re just in it for the money then you’re just in it for the money. Customer service is an opportunity cost as opposed to genuine feedback and blogging is something you let your PR department babysit – like a red-headed stepchild.
So, I find it rather interesting, that one of the companies who has kindly provided us with a speaker, WebTrends, has just announced a new analytics add-on that measures engagement score:
ANALYTICS FIRM WEBTRENDS HAS A new patented add-on that lets marketers set specific values for each of their Web pages and then calculate an on-the-fly engagement score for each specific visitor.
“Conceptually, it’s brilliant,” said Jim Sterne, founding president of the Web Analytics Association. “Not only is this on the money, this is the money.
“Time on site tells you how long someone was on your site,” Sterne added, “but they might have been on the phone, or they might have been angry or distracted. The deeper they go into your site, the more engaged they are. Now you can see where they come in and where they go and assign a weight to each page.”
Sterne gave the example of a conference Web site that might assign different scores to key pages such as the agenda and the registration. Rather than having to go through a specific user’s path and interpret its meaning, the WebTrends Score tells you who is most engaged.
An engagement score add-on that you could use to measure sign-ups on a conference site?
How come we didn’t get the chance to beta test it?
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