Posted by Dr-Pete Marketers can get caught up in specific metrics, focusing on those data points that make you look good in reporting, but don’t help you understand your performance. In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Dr. Pete discusses the vanity we bring to the metrics we track, and how to take a better, more realistic view of your results. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video TranscriptionHi, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Dr. Pete, the Marketing Scientist for Moz, and I want to talk to you today about vanity metrics. So I think we all have an intuition of what that means, but what I want to discuss today is I think we get caught up in this being about specific metrics. To me, the problem isn't the metrics themselves. The problem is the vanity. So I want to talk about us and what we bring to metrics, and how to do better no matter what the metric is. SEO metric funnelSo I want to start with this kind of simplistic SEO funnel of metrics, starting with ranking. RankingRanking via click-through rate delivers traffic. Traffic via conversion rate delivers leads or sales or conversions or whatever you want to call them, the money. Then beyond that, we might have some more advanced metrics, like lifetime value, that kind of get into revenue over time or profit over time. Naturally, over time we've moved down this funnel and kind of put our attention more at the bottom, at the bottom line and the dollars. TrafficTraffic, okay, traffic is good. But if you've ever had a piece of viral content that went really big but ended up not driving any conversions because it had nothing to do with your site, you know that's not so great. Sales and lifetime valueSo I know it's easy to look at this and say, "Okay, but come on, sales. The bottom line is the bottom line." Well, I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a big sale and you set everything to 50% off, and you bring in a ton of new sales and a ton of revenue. But let's say I tell you that your profit margins were 20%. Is that a good thing? You just cost yourself a lot of money. Now maybe you had another agenda and you're hoping to bring them back, or there's a branding aspect. But by itself we don't know necessarily if that's a great thing. Just making more revenue isn't so great. Even profit or something like lifetime value, this is an example based in real life, but I'm going to change it a little bit to protect the innocent. Let's say you were a small company and you owned some kind of an asset. You owned some intellectual property, or you owned a piece of physical property and you sold that one year at significant profit, big margins. The three RsSo that's the first thing. Is this a real result? Is that number going up necessarily good by itself? Without the context, you can't know that. The second thing where I think we really need to look at the entire funnel and not get focused too far down is repairs, fixing what's broken.
Yes, I tried a little too hard to get three R's in here. But this is repeating success. If something works and you get a bunch of sales, even if it's high margin, you get profitable sales, but you don't know what you did, you don't know what really drove that, where did the traffic come from, what was the source of that, was it specific pieces of content, was it specific keywords, what campaign was that tied to, you can't replicate that success. So three R's. Results, consider the context of the metric. Repairs, be able to work up the funnel and know what's broken. If things go well, replication. Be able to repeat your successes and hopefully do it again. So again, vanity, it's not in the metric. It's in us. You can have vanity with any of these things. So don't get caught up in any one thing. Consider the whole funnel. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via Blogger Every Metric Is A Vanity Metric Os comentários estão fechados.
|
Categorias |