Data is sexy – just ask Avinash Kaushik

I am not a data geek. I don't live for data. Other people here at Yaffe do, but I'm not one of them. I appreciate how data can help me develop better creative or social strategies, but data makes my eyes glaze over. That being said, I love Avinash Kaushik's outlook on data and analytics. Seriously, I could listen to him all day, because as he himself would say "data is sexy" – at least when he presents it.

I had the pleasure of seeing Avinash present last week at The Art of Marketing in Chicago. (Much thanks to Mitch Joel and Twist Image, for the invite and the sweet seats up front!) He opened up talking about people who use web hits as a key measurement by explaining that HITS stands for How Idiots Tell Success, in other words, it's not a good measure of anything. You need to look at specifics against objectives. Look at your bounce rate, if it's high, people are telling you "I came, I puked, I left!" – they didn't find what they wanted or it was a bad experience. Even many of those who have taken out their wallets to buy something are finding something that turns them away – as evidenced by the average online shopping cart abandonment rate of 70%.

So, what do you measure? For one thing, says Avinash, you should measure your share of search. He also said we spend to much time looking at aquisition data and should look at it in combination with "behavior" and "outcomes" metrics – viewing all three at the same time. He then showed us some more meaningful ways to look at data charts – ones he thought were very sexy. I have to admit, they were way sexier than your typical pie chart or bar graph. 

Finally, Avinash talked about what he thinks are the 4 key measurements for Social Media:

Conversation Rate – which is how many interactions you generate per post.

Amplification Rate – the number of followers who share your post and the number of their followers who share it.

Applause Rate – the number of positive comments/denotations generated per post.

Economic Value – the sum of short and long term conversions plus the cost savings.

He suggested a great place to find a dashboard to measure all this was at www.truesocialmetrics.com/metric

This is all good information, but there's nothing like hearing Avinash Kaushik talk about them himself. He gets very excited and it's infectious. He talks about little things like how we need to create a series of little orgasms for our potential clients/buyers with what we do online. And he knows how to achieve it. If you'd like to hear Avinash talk about some of this stuff, I'd recommend listening to this recent podcast interview between him and Mitch Joel.

So, what are you measuring these days? Is it measuring up? Are you creating little orgasms or are people leaving before they ever get where you want them to go?

Mike McClure – new data fan