kinaze 's Public Library

Dashboards — the most popular form of reports — have a pretty simple purpose: provide an at-a-glance view of what has happened since the last update, and ensure that, at a glance, any anomalies jump out. More often than not, there won’t be anomalies, so there is nothing that needs to be analyzed based on the report!

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Secondly, a large variation is an indication of an unstable process (think conversion rate), or low reproductibitiliy (anecdotal campaign success), or if you prefer, a larger standard deviation reduces our ability to predict the value of Y given a certain X.

If a single post on Coke’s facebook wall reaches an audience of 3mm viewers (measurable), and is liked/commented by 10% of viewers (measurable), and that is seen by their friends (measurable), you can estimate the total reach.

If you are stuck in the ROI trenches, you will never be able to understand what a sale is worth, and you will never be able to state what you are wiling to pay to create a new customer or rekindle the flame with an old one.

hen you deliver the message, deliver a prediction, not a predictive model

Also, deliver the right message to the right people. CEOs care about stock price and company valuation, which means cash flow, market share, and innovative things to talk to the world about. COOs care about efficiency and good ideas that will impact the business directly. CMOs care about using their budget effectively and being able to show the value of their existence in terms of changes since the last CMO was fired 3 months ago.

Nobody gives a crap about engagement. Engagement is just a stepping stone on the way to “worth,” and it’s a non-predictive stone. Once you’ve moved on, you’ll never look back.

WTP as a concept is that in the absence of real return (or even better yet, in the presence of real return, but also realizing that there is value BEYOND the real return), you can still value an outcome appropriately.

The idea is that you can begin to see how varying visitor (and visit) scores affect conversion and customer loyalty.

Linear allocation can be really useful in many cases. However, as Adam pointed out, “[linear] allocation tends to reward visits with smaller number of clicks and punish visits with many clicks. 

 In SiteCatalyst, you would never attempt to segment/breakdown Success Events by a Traffic Variable (You can do this in Omniture Discover, but not in SiteCatalyst).