Some see online audience metrics as a black art, and this is a great group of diviners to get to the bottom of audience behavior. Quantitative metrics can help to build a qualitative story, but it all starts with quantitative. Qualitative comes from registration when it works but Paul Gerbino, Publisher at ThomasNet Industrial News, also looks at IP addresses to see where requests are coming from. This work well for an industrial news network as the IP addresses oftentimes go back to company IP addresses. In a raising of hands most attendees had Web sites that have fewer than a million page views a month. Regardless of the size of audience, loyal audiences have value, but providing features associated with registration features can allow non-registered audiences to build audience value while getting demographics about those loyal enough to register. How do you convey information about audience - unique visitors is the standard, but you have to be careful, have to do some cookie filtering to get "first party" cookies from SiteCatalyst and other third parties. Third party cookies are blocked oftentimes by filters so visitors may be assigned new cookies on each visit. Nevertheless you can benefit from third party cookies.

Paul Gerbino: all the numbers could be correct, but it could be how your package is reporting data that could be misleading. He uses three different packages for analysis. Saw what appeared to be a site crash in statistics, turned out to be a reconfiguration error in production. Take it all with a grain of salt, but you can get "good enough" statistics - if you're willing to get more than one package. Not clear, though, if more than one package impacts revenues. But without a good base of metrics to process into cubes in a relational database you could inflate or undercount a particular segment. Need also to get into further behavioral analytics, such as which links on a page are entry and exit points. This can tie into taxonomies, categorization and other tools that help users navigate through a site. To some degree it can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: what you promote through links and content recommendations will get more visits. But other content may be search-driven, newsletter-driven and other points. Use metrics to look at trends and plan accordingly.

Question: How will RSS feeds impact metrics? A bit of a black box, track subscribers, treat them as newsletter subscribers - engaged customers. Like other forms of impression need to be able to follow them after the impression has been delivered, FeedBurner can't tell you what happens what they get to a site. Paul: RSS initiates about 15 percent of their page view traffic, Boeing pulls it into their intranet, it's an anomymous feed, can get a lot of pulls in a 24-hour basis, can follow them as they visit to the site.

There seemed to be a gap in this panel. People like Paul who are using every tool at their disposal have a better chance of being able to paint an accurate story about what audiences are doing. Sticking with one tool for metrics is a little like trying to find a forest fire from one fixed position: triangulation helps.

Labels: ABM, audience measurement, Digital Velocity, events, Paul Gerbino