metrics, be careful what you wish for

10 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

Nielsen’s been hard at work improving their already massively popular online metrics system, the @Plan.

From Nielsen, regarding the current system:

@Plan, the leading target-marketing platform for Internet media planning, buying and selling, delivers the industry’s most comprehensive profiling of ad-supported Web sites today. With more than 3,600 profile points and 19 profile categories, @Plan reveals wide-ranging details about the U.S. adult online population, capturing everything from basic demographics to in-depth lifestyle and buying preference data.

According to AdAge, Nielsen announced it would be tripling the number of sites included in the data, and it would shift from questionnaires to electronic tracking of user traffic patterns all in the effort of producing more accurate and granular results for their clients.

Well… it looks like it may be too accurate.

From the article,

Multiple publishers passed along data they consider suspect from the @Plan system. Among them: The old data said 76% of FoxSports.com audiences had watched a game on TV in the previous week. The new numbers say just 50%. The old @Plan data had 11.1% of MTV.com visitors identified as students; the new data say just 4.5%.

It gets more striking: Under the old system, 32% of People.com visitors also read the magazine. The new data say just 8% had read the magazine the prior week.

Not to worry, Nielsen has delayed the launch of the new @Plan product in order to reassess the platform based on the complaints of their highest paying accounts, and in order to get the system right.

what’s the point?

22 Feb, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments

Mike just wrote an excellent post about measurement.

As budgets shrink and companies demand closer accounting of every penny they spend, “measurement” has suddenly become the hot new industry buzz word. Clients are demanding a new level of accountability from their digital agencies, and it’s long overdue.

The implications of this shift, though, go well beyond a renewed interest in metrics that the client should have been getting all along. Clients are also seeking a greater level of detail in statistics across all marketing disciplines and executions. More granular statistics can uncover a world of new insights about a brand’s health online. Best of all, tracking these additional metrics over time can give brands an incredibly deep and well-rounded long-term perspective on their overall success.

I foresee a giant tsunami wave on the horizon of back lash against social media. It’s become such an incestuous industry (and it smells a bit too much like the PR industry, for me). Accountability is the only way to survive. Undercurrent is pushing hard to lead the charge on digital metrics. We’re working with software firms, talking to major platforms, and bringing global brands together to track and measure like never before. More on that later.

But we also have to ask the question, “Why?” Why are we compiling this massive backlog of data? Nothing turns my knob like a good spreadsheet, but what’s the point? It’s impossible to connect your Facebook fan page back to your sales data, just as it’s impossible to account total sales with views of your :30 spot. We don’t know exactly how advertising works. We just know that if you do a shit ton of it, people do start to buy your product more. No matter how much data we compile, we’ll never understand, with certainty, why our products are purchased.

The problem is that consumption and culture are inextricably linked. Consumption is culture and culture is consumption. And for that reason, you have to set objectives to work against beyond selling more product. You should be asking yourself questions like, what defines culture for my audience? How is culture communicated, distorted, remixed, and made whole again for them? Where does it take place? Where do I fit in? You have to build metrics off having an impact in the places culture is communicated and defined for your audiences.

I said in a recent slideshare, a dollar spent on fans is a dollar spent on R&D, recruitment, loyalty, and longevity. It’s time to define objectives in those terms, too. You should set an objective for product innovation, hiring, share of wallet, and long term value. The more actions beyond sales we can define, the more actionable we can make our data and analysis.