Are you analyzing the right landing page stuff?

I just read “Entrepreneurs: Beware of Vanity Metrics” by Eric Ries in the Harvard Business Review blog. And I say, “Damn right!”. Eric defines vanity metrics as “numbers which look good on paper but aren’t action oriented.” 

If you look deep down in your soul you’ll probably find some vanity landing page metrics. And you know it’s time to toss them out. For years marketers have been guilty of vanity analysis, and victim of software & services vendors who allow it. While vanity numbers can look stellar on paper (lots of clicks & hits - success!) they don’t say much about the overall result of the campaign (everyone bounced & no one converted - failure!). To see the numbers that truly matter, you have to dig down and turn your numbers into people. Because people click links. You have to look at who converted, what they did that led to conversion and then you have to dig some more.  I am not talking about looking at 10,000 user records individually—you can look see the ‘individual’ at the aggregate level if you have the right tools.

Ries says to avoid falling into the vanity metrics trap, analysts should follow the “three A’s of metrics” when it comes to creating analytic reports.

• Actionable - marketers should clearly see a method of replicating the results they are looking at
• Accessible - data should be easily found and understood by all employees
• Auditable - data should be viewed as credible and easy to learn from by even the most skeptical person within the organization

I’d say audit-able is the #1 most important one on the list. Ries goes on to say:

Metrics are really reports on people. This is where most off-the-shelf metrics packages fail. For example, consider a report that claims in a split-test between two proposed features, feature A generated more revenue than feature B. Which people used feature A? Which people used feature B? Can a skeptic call them up and ask them questions about their use of each feature? If not, how can we generate actionable insights about what to test next? Or consider a report that reports abstract quantities, like website hits or attrition rates. These are hard to visualize. But if instead our metrics say a sports stadium full of people declined to buy our product. Ouch. We can all viscerally relate to that.

Significant optimization of web pages and conversion rates cannot be achieved if marketers are focusing on vanity metrics. Create reports and crunch numbers that are action oriented and make sense to everyone. Even to that pesky skeptic. That was our mission when we built the specialized LiveBall reports for landing page analysis and I love it when those reports come together in “a-ha!” moments of clarity and insight.