Not too long ago, I asked a former colleague to give me his view on the implementation of a measurement tool.  While I had partially expected a response related to the technical implementation, his response aligned with an important truth–implementations are only as important as their inherent backbone–a measurement strategy.

With that I would like to introduce Martin Cook, a Performance Measurement Consultant for EMC Conchango. Based out of London, England Martin has a deep background in measuring online behavior and helping organizations understand the benefit in producing sound measurement strategies as a basis for all digital investments.  Implementations and the software used are merely tools – while some are better than others none of them will do the job without proper application.

Next week at Engage we will be discussing implementations in my workshop, Planning for Success:  Implementation Strategies.  While the content will be focused around how WebTrends can be implemented on your website, I’d like to think of this idea of measurement strategy and ROI during our workshop discussions.

Why are measurement strategies so important?

Measurement strategies enable us to measure performance against business goals and justify the business case.

In this day and age how many clients still do not know how their online offering is performing? Especially in the current economic climate, it’s vitally important to understand your company’s performance against its goals and what is working well and more importantly what can work harder! Without this knowledge it can and has proved catastrophic to many businesses throughout the world. If your organisation is even the slightest bit slack at establishing an effective measurement strategy, your competition will be more agile at reacting in these times and capitalising on opportunities. We need to look beyond the credit crunch and economic downturn to focus on the opportunities that will arise, upon the upturn.

Establish the overall business goal – what you are trying to achieve as a business.

With budgets tightening globally, how many of our clients are confident they know the winning formula for this year’s spend? In my experience, there are few clients who have a detailed measurement strategy with a long term view and are actively using techniques such as ROI calculations and actively forecast performance on a detailed level.

This transparency of performance needs to be at the heart our client’s business strategies, with clear defined measurable goals and a view of what success will look like. Our clients need performance measurement now more than ever before, so when the economy does improve, they will be in a better position to take advantage – making data driven decisions and knowing the opportunities and how to grasp them with both hands!!

We all know there are lots of ways to capture requirements, with the aim of understanding what the business is trying to achieve and how it’s going to get there. A measurement strategy will enable you to determine clear project scope by determining whether the aim is to measure a specific project(s), a whole digital channel or multi-channel analytics. I’ve found that the goal determining requirements is similar for each client but how you get there is specific to each scenario. Whether you use a range requirements techniques like, requirements gathering, goal setting or value mapping – the key point is to get the truth out. Clearly agreeing what the client needs to know and why ……and crude as it might sound, what will it be used for? Without out this how will the business agree what it is aiming to achieve and what success will look like.

We all know the value of understanding business performance, but having a clear view of what you have done and how well you’ve done it before can also prove advantageous. By this I mean reviewing existing and current performance. I‘ve found it beneficial to highlight, what has worked well and highlight what could potentially work harder! This knowledge is invaluable to compare against industry benchmarks and ensures your measurement strategy is not just limited to isolated data, as your business certainly won’t be.

Businesses have different goals and perform differently, consequently measurement metrics need to reflect this.

One common mistake is to just think, if I measure everything I can’t possibly have missed anything – I’ll know it all! BUT, firstly you could be wasting valuable effort and without the focus, you certainly won’t have time to answer every question! Whilst I have also experienced clients who have only focussed on a couple of metrics relevant to their role, they have therefore missed the value of a general overview. The aim is to only define the detailed metrics, once you know what the overall goal and success criteria is.

We know the Enterprise measurement solutions are complex and will be able to measure almost any metrics you need, but you need to focus on what is most important to you. It’s a common problem for organisations to focus on the metrics, without establishing what they are trying to achieve and why. The effort should be spent establishing clearly what the overall goals and objectives are, how the different business strategies will achieve them. To then apply expert knowledge of performance measurement, to establish which metrics and measurements will demonstrate performance.

Technology is continually advancing and you have to keep up, specifically in terms of measurement or you won’t know the level of impact a new initiative has had on the business. For example since the emergence of web 2.0 technologies, the standard suite of online metrics doesn’t always accurately measure the performance of rich and interactive design or how customers interact with platforms such as mobile.

Consequently, we in this industry have to create metrics that can accurately measure performance of non standard metrics and therefore tie them back to ROI. So instead of standard metrics of unique visitors, page views, content groups etc, we need to adapt our measurements to establish levels of engagement, influence, relevance and perception to name a few. I feel that some businesses lose value by spending time on tasks or strategies that are not the critical path of achieving the overall business goals. If we highlight these in the measurement strategy, we’ll be closer to ensuring a unified focus, regardless of individual business disciplines.

By including data sources that are relevant to established business goals, it means rich sources can help to determine a holistic view of performance but this doesn’t mean every type of data. This can mean using softer metrics to combine with the usual metrics suite, for example understanding brand perception studies, customer satisfaction surveys or customer data to understand how customers differ from offline to online – as we will have highlighted in our measurement strategy, it is dependent on the goals and performance measures you are trying to measure against.

Delivering the information that demonstrates performance, in a format that can be understood and acted upon.

So great, you have done the first 2 (done all the hard work). Now you need to make sure the audience can understand it! Sounds obvious I know, but how many organisations spend time and circulate performance reports, that the only person who requesting the information or the person who did the analysis understands! I feel that, if our customers or colleagues cannot understand and interpret the performance information and then convey the findings to proactively make changes, then we have failed.

We need to focus on providing clients the information they need, whilst also having an understanding of the audience who receive the information and how they require the information. It’s vital we satisfy a range of clients, from analytics novices to those organisations who have customer insight teams with individuals with the ability to delve into the data and pull out those gems of information, which lead to a competitive edge. Vitally this means, as part of establishing the correct measurement metrics, we need to determine the most effective way to illustrate the results be it visual, textual or combination of both – knowing the audience, their roles and how the information will be used are essential.

Some of you will no doubt have of heard of Martin Wattenberg and his inspiring data visualisation techniques  He uses some innovative techniques to use visualisation to explain what the data is telling us. Now I’m not saying, we need to reinvent the wheel to display findings relevant to our clients but understanding the audience of where the rich performance data is going and what it is going to be used for is key, as we all know a picture is worth a thousand words…..

To my second point, around adapting metrics to measure new technologies and social media, new metrics lead to another opportunity to represent information in innovative ways to illustrate the story you are trying to tell. Here are some innovative and inspiring Social media visualisations  that make use of data in some stunning visualisations and provide some examples of how data can be used more effectively to illustrate a trend or insight.

A common mistake I have experienced is when people try to make a tool or an existing configuration to provide the answer for the question you think needs answering. It’s true an analytics tool can help you answer questions BUT the focus should be on the interpretation of the information, which is key. A tool will not give you the answer, your team’s interpretation will, BUT insight derived from interpretation is only as good as the source it comes from.

So now, you have the right information tied to business goals and objectives. You are using metrics, relevant to the each specific requirement areas. Also you know how the audience requires the information and how it will be used. Think about the point you are illustrating, what the performance data is telling you and crucially, what the actions to be taken. By helping our clients achieve these steps and using metrics in context to their business goals, we will help them protect themselves in challenging markets but to also seize the opportunities when breaking into the upturn.

Tags: context, delivery, EMC2, goals, guest, Implementation, london, Martin Cook, martin wattenberg, measurement strategy, objectives, social media, strategy, technology

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Customer Experience, Emerging Technologies, Global Perspective, Industry Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.