During the Traveling Geeks trip to the UK I had the good fortune of having a Flip Ultra HD recorder in my pocket when I bumped into Jim Sterne. Jim runs the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and is also chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

Our interview took place on the third story of the historic Globe Theatre overlooking the Thames during the Econsultancy Roundtable on our last day in London, and the 5-minute video came out fairly well, considering the lack of fill lighting, the lack of a tripod and some audio artifacts from the Flip.

Sterne, head of Target Marketing of Santa Barbara, breaks down analytics into three main buckets:

1Website ratings: What’s happening on the Internet in general? Which websites are the most popular? Popular services include comScore, Nielsen/Netratings, Hitwise as well other tools like Quantcast and Alexa.

2Advertising: The ad industry needs to know how many ads are being served and whether they’re being clicked. Doubleclick is the giant of the field; the Atlas Network, 24/7 Real Media and Right Media are other players.

3Web analytics: At each website, what is the user’s behavior? Are they arriving on the landing page? Do they bounce off (hit one page and go no further)? Can I tweak the persuasion process to improve the conversion rate? What’s their demographic and behavioral makeup? Customer satisfaction and tracking social media traffic also tie into this. Measurement tools and firms include Google Analytics, Omniture, Web Trends and CoreMetrics.

Measuring social media

Sterne said social media can be measured in a number of ways: How often am I (or my company) mentioned? Is that mention positive or negative? Does it drive traffic to my site? Is it qualified, valuable traffic?

Social media play a valuable role in gauging customer satisfaction, he added. People are talking about my brand in positive ways and negative ways, in which case I need to respond by fixing the problem and thanking them for making me aware of it.

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