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12.18.07 
Underappreciated Metrics To Track In The Coming Year
 By
Rohit Bhargava
This post is the continuation of a topic I started all about the right metrics to focus on and how many marketing teams may be using the wrong ones without realizing it.
In Part I, I shared 10 meaningless metrics that brands should consider moving away from. Most of those metrics are either based on precedent (what brands have always measured) or ignorance (a lack of knowledge about other metrics to track). As a whole, the single word that defines the old view of metrics is to focus on impressions. A more sophisticated model measures engagement or interaction (ie - a more active consumption of content). Eyeballs are not enough. So, to help you start thinking outside your typical metrics, here are some of the underappreciated metrics that I believe more brands should focus on in 2008:
1. Inbound Links (from influential sources) - Most marketers right now are already paying attention to inbound links, but the problem with most is that there is no qualitative assessment. What this means, for example, is that getting included on the blogroll of a spam blog is the equivalent of getting mentioned in a post on a high influence blog. They are not equal, which is why the Technorati Authority rating made it onto my list of most meaningless metrics yesterday. Getting smarter about measuring inbound links, however, will be crucial - and this means paying more attention to where that link comes from.
2. Direct URL Access - Do you record how many people get to your site by directly typing in the URL? This may be the most important ignored metric of all. The reason is that it tells you volumes about your brand and your marketing if you can find a way to get better at measuring it. When someone directly types your URL into their browser, it indicates familiarity with your brand, recall of a particular message that made your URL stick in their heads, qualified traffic and a likeliness that they are seeking some piece of information specifically.
3. RSS Subscribers - Most bloggers have already started to pay more attention to how many RSS subscribers they have and even use it as a badge of honor when describing the traffic to their blog. Aside from being more accurate than inbound links as a measure of influence simply because it is much tougher to accidentally count spam as traffic, this allows you to measure a level of engagement as well. If someone has chosen to subscribe to your content, that indicates a depth of engagement that a simple page view does
not.
4. Email Link Referrals - We all know that people cut and paste links and forward content to one another, but few marketers pay enough attention to tracking this. The reason is fairly obvious ... when you get a link coming through from a forwarded email, it is typically impossible to follow. As a result, it is rarely counted in referring links and ignored as a source of traffic. Yet, once again, if someone sends a link to your content to someone else, it is likely to indicate a level of engagement that is far higher.
5. Time Spent (engagement) - In my post yesterday, I noted that time spent can be a misleading metric because it can also unintentionally give you credit for having a confusing user interface that takes a long time for a user to navigate (thus inflating your time spent). This doesn't, however, mean that I think you should ignore the time spent metric altogether. It still provides a valuable data point, assuming you are confident that you are measuring actual engagement rather than time wasted.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Rohit Bhargava is the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com
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