How to Simplify Choosing an Analytics Metric

Knowing the score for your business is like knowing the score of your favorite team

Deciding on metric can be as multifaceted as deciding on a clothing to wear or choosing a movie.  Fortunately the facets can be, well, less-multi with a few reminders of what the metric is for.

First consider what an analytic report essentially consists of - metrics and dimensions:

• A Metric captures a measurement, such as visits or time on site
• A Dimension reveals where the measurement occurred, such as a webpage or a referring source of traffic.

If these two ideas are difficult to visualize, think of a scoreboard. Now imagine your favorite team playing against a rival - college football, NFL, soccer, baseball,it does not matter. The dimensions always represents the teams you are interested in. Metrics are the "scores" for that team.

Questions to ask when choosing the metrics worth measuring:

1.Is the metric valuable for an operation?

Monitoring a lot of metrics can take time away from making decisions about the metrics in the first place.  Know what the cost to measure and monitor a metric - would a change in that metric affect your business operation? The answer to that question will reveal if it's worth the time to measure.

2.Is the metric addressing an operational decision, like a paid search campaign, or is the metric a strategic decision to the brand?

This is a follow up question to ask after answering the first. Here's the significance behind the meaning of this question:

1. An operational decision is one in which there is specific answer, as in a misfire of a tag or a page not recorded within the analytics. Operational decisions can include metrics such as Average Time On Site, a Goal, or Conversion Rate.
2. Strategic decisions are a series of tactically activities meant to address a problem.  They can be ambiguous, so the answers create a cascading effect. Examples such as determining the quality of site visitors or What Traffic Sources are good sources for link request can be strategic in nature.

Either kind of decision can be encountered separately in reviewing analytics data. From a business perspective, both choices help to organize the actions needed. An operational choice usually requires an immediate attention, such as halting a paid search campaign.  Others can be more about strategic, such as reviewing the sites from which referral traffic arrives from.  Make sure to develop a todo list and see how the needs fits these two outlooks.

3. Does the metric exist in the analytic solutions being used?

This implies the need for another source of data, clearly. But the next thought behind  that question is the administrative choices required to obtain outside data. An additional source like Quantcast can provide an additional tag where others may require a visualization tool such as Tableau to pull data in, or GA data grabber to pull Google Analytics data into a spreadsheet conveniently. To determine the importance, consider if the metrics addresses an operational need, and then if there are strategic decisions that are subsequent of choosing the outside metric.
One additional tip: If the metrics are based on API-sourced data examine how the API publisher provides support.  Understanding what protocols are used and supported will help determine dashboards needs to monitor a metrics associated with an API.