My super hero, Avinash Kaushik wrote a wonderful blog last week Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques In that blog, he warned us to avoid using four amigos, common metrics that are misleading and yield little insights. These four pigs are:
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Averages
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Percentage
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Ratios
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Compound Metrics (aka Calculated Metrics)
Well, apparently not everybody gets the memo. Sad! Today I got a marketing email from Omniture titled “MarketingSherpa eMail Summit Special Offer” and in that email, I was asked to learn more about the benefits of integrating email with Web analytics, specifically,
how StubHub increased their “revenue per email” by over 2,500% and click-thru rate by over 550% (Download StubHub Success Story) .
wow, 2,500% and 550%, that will surely get people jump out of windows and sign up for the special offer. But not for waving fans of Avinash’s blog!
The remedy is simple, just go to look at the raw numbers. Unfortunately that’s not something Omniture is willing to give to me, at least not until I give my all personal information and sign up for the white paper. In this case, privacy is not my main concern because they should have my personal information in their customer database. But enough is enough, I lose my interests–sorry for my short attention span. 
One final thought for the email marketing people: if you have customer information already, wouldn’t it be so much nicer that the information can be auto-populated so that users don’t have to fill it again to just get the white paper? Isn’t that a big opportunity to increase lead?
Feel free to share examples like this with us. It will surely make us smarter or at least LOL.
