Let Your Quantitative Metrics Be Quantitative

If you’ve been following web analytics commentary in the blogosphere (talk about a micro-niche), you’re probably aware of the ongoing debate about Eric Peterson’s proposed Engagement model. Peterson and fellow analytics guru Avinash Kaushik have respectfully disagreed back and forth on their blogs about the nature and value of such a metric for some time, and I have been torn between the two perspectives. It seems well suited for a site that is not commerce-driven, so I decided to just give it a try and see for myself whether or not it was worthwhile.

I spent a bit of time on Friday working in WebTrends to see how easily I could put together the different components and start tracking Engagement on our site. It wasn’t going too well, and I commented about it on Twitter. A brief conversation ensued with Chris Grant and by the end of the day, our conversation was referenced in a blog post by Aaron Gray of WebTrends about Eric Peterson’s dismissal of Twitter as a marketing tool.

I commented on Aaron’s post to come out in favor of Twitter, but also to say that I disagreed with Eric when he implied that something could not be valuable if it were not instantly measurable. For whatever reason, this stuck with me as I went about my afternoon until finally it hit me. The engagement model is trying to create a qualitative metric out of quantitative metrics. I thought this was a revelation until I reread Avinash’s post on Engagement, where he says basically the same thing:

“At the heart of it engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative. Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative.”

At the end of the day, I think I’d be better off looking for a way to bring in real qualitative data from our users and letting my quantitative metrics be quantitative. Next up on Friday Night Running, I’ll take sides in the “Web Analytics is Easy/Hard” debate.