Metrics, Metrics, Everywhere: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Website and Social Media

Workshop
Brian Alpert, Smithsonian Institution, USA, Sarah Banks, Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, USA, Erin Marie Blasco, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, USA, Effie Kapsalis, Smithsonian Institution Archives, USA

From the web’s earliest days, digital professionals have been pressed to demonstrate that their online efforts were contributing to their organizations, whether by increased revenue, a more finely-honed brand identity, or the profound ability to enhance their mission via content delivery to anyone with a browser. Along comes social media, connecting millions in ways never before possible, disrupting the landscape and breathing new life into the questions: “Why is this important and how do we know it’s working?” Today’s landscape is a splintered collection of new channels, inscrutable metrics, and a dizzying array of tools offering a dizzying range of possibilities with which to answer the classic question, “What do I measure?” and its first cousin, “What does that have to do with our program?”

Join Smithsonian’s Brian Alpert, Sarah Banks, Erin Blasco and Effie Kapsalis as they work with participants to refine and articulate this conversation through a series of examples, case studies and recommendations. In addition to presenting a manageable, common sense approach to selecting metrics and extending the web analytics process to social media, examples will demonstrate how metrics served to support organizational goals and what tools proved most useful. Brian will present the process for measuring websites and social media in terms of your goals. He will also discuss the ongoing conversion to Google’s “Universal” code, the “User ID” feature, and discuss what changes are in store for ALL Google Analytics users. Effie and Erin will present case studies showing this process in action, illustrating how their approaches to social media, website and mobile measurement are mapped to specific goals. Erin will lead a group exercise that will bring participants closer to the actual process steps and definitions, and Sarah will talk about Google Analytics for mobile apps and show a framework she devised to help measure a museum’s impact through its social media outreach.

Bibliography:
Kaushik, "The "Action Dashboard" (An Alternative To Crappy Dashboards)" (2008)
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/the-action-dashboard-an-alternative-to-crappy-dashboards/

Kaushik, "Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value" (2011)
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/

Alpert, Cut Through the Fog: Using GA Data Grabber to Act on Google Analytics Data (2012)
http://www.slideshare.net/balpert/web-analytics-mcn2012slideshare-15180525

Alpert, Villaespesa, Original "Metrics, Metrics Everywhere" (2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/balpert/ga-and-socialmediametricsmcn2013

Alpert, "Google Analytics: MVPs and Game-Changing New Features" (2014)
http://www.slideshare.net/balpert/google-analytics-mvps-and-gamechanging-new-features