Do you know how effective each of your individual marketing tactics is? Many small business owners market in a vacuum. They spend money on brochures, advertisements and web sites with no real way to tie specific results to specific endeavors.
Flying Blind? Search Marketing Metrics
At the beginning of the Balanced Scorecard, a book on the new generation of performance metrics, authors Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton present an analogy to drive home their case. They ask you to imagine entering an airline jet cockpit, and in front of the pilot, you see just one gauge.
Understanding Web Metrics to Improve Site Performance
Many home-based online entrepreneurs keep their eyes on the ball, but fail to stop to check the score. In the rush to be online, these entrepreneurs focus too much on where they are going – e.g. increasing their traffic and sales, marketing their sites, improving their content, attracting a community of loyal visitors, and other goals. While important for the success of an online business, they often overlook checking where their businesses are. Many Web publishers fail to understand how users come to the site and what those users do once they get there. Not knowing where exactly a business stands is risky, particularly on the Internet where things change so rapidly.
Metrics Matter!
Recently, I talked with a speaker about her “extremely successful” Website. She based this opinion on the fact that she was selling several e-books every day and generating “some calls”. When I asked if she was reviewing her traffic analysis, she said “No, why should we – it’s clearly working – we can tell that from the sales”. I didn’t ask if she knew how her sales and calls compared to the actual visitor numbers for the site – I suspected that she’d have been shocked to learn how many more opportunities she was losing.
Risk Metrics Needed for IT Security
Business leaders worldwide are becoming more aware of the importance of assuring the security of information assets. Information-security issues are among the hottest topics being addressed in trade media for organizational governance, executive, financial, audit, and IT leaders. Conferences covering the latest information-security issues, tools, and problems abound in both the public and private sectors.
Using Benchmarking Metrics to Uncover Best Practices
For companies, embracing change means seeking out and adopting best practices. Benchmarking–the research and analysis of quantitative, empirical data–is a way to isolate weaknesses and strengths and to make connections between best practices and performances. Once these connections have been made, determining which practices are appropriate for an organization to adopt becomes a competitive imperative.
Do Your Metrics Measure Up?
At a recent neighborhood function, I had a discussion with someone who worked in the finance area for one of the Big 4 accounting firms. Since he specialized in the valuation of companies, I asked him about the models he used and he brushed me aside to tell me it was all about the assumptions, not the models per se.