Measuring Your Success - Essential Forum Primer Options

[Black_Knight]

This forum is all about metrics and measurement, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is about stats, logs or traffic. This forum is destined to be somewhat broader than that.

Our objective is a broad one. More of a mission statement than a defined objective.

We want to get people thinking about measuring all kinds of success, from successful design (which may cover user feedback and split-run-testing methods), usability issues (so can discuss how to measure usability, including surveying users and using study-groups) as well as the obvious commercial issues, (which won't just be about tracking stuff, but also in how to get data and test ideas too).

It is really all about finding, and using, ways to measure things that are important to you, from visitor stats through to branding effects, and from usability through to ROI. The really neat part would be when we discuss things that haven't been measured before, and try to find ways to measure and manage things many might take for granted, or make assumptions about.

For me personally, finding ways to count the uncountable, or at least, to measure and weigh things that have traditionally gone unmetered, is exactly what I'd like the mission statement of the new forum to be.

We'll talk about studies and surveys, response rates to things other than sales pitches, have marketers discussing how we might seek to measure branding effects, and hopefully gather some of our usability folks over to discuss ways that we might start to quantify things like engagability.

As this is a new forum (at time of writing this), I can't (yet) provide a list of 'must read' threads that you won't find just as easily from the forum index page. It will be up to all of us to seek to change that.

[projectphp]

Some Additional resources and Links:
Remote Log analyzer recommendations

The best known and respected log analysers include:
Analog FREE. Combine with Report Magic for best results.
Funnel Web Analyser
FastStats
WebTrends
NetTracker (very powerful but expensive)

Other Solutions:
mod_log_sql - A module for Apache that logs all requests to a MySQL database (postGRESQL has been promised for a while, no idea if they ever did it).
Clicktracks - offer logfile and remote JavaScript collection of data.
Google Analytics (aka Urchin) - A free JavaScript based tracking solution.


Also, both Google AdWords and Overture / Yahoo Search Marketing offer cross platform tracking with their PPC programmes.