On The Trail

As you may have noticed, I didn’t get around to posting anything about days 2 or 3 of eMetrics. I figured it was more important to spend the time participating in the conference than it was to write about it. That said, the conference and the thoughts it stirred up will be providing me with quite a bit of content here for a while. If you’d like good reporting and commentary of this year’s eMetrics check out these thoughtful posts by Eric Peterson and Robbin Steif (in both cases these are the last of several posts, so keep clicking).
One thing that has been rolling around in my head for the last week was a discussion I had about branding KPIs during the “Critical Few KPI Discussion”. I mentioned to the group that we always report the proportion of branded vs. non-branded searches even though there isn’t really anything we can do based on that info. But, as soon as I said it, it occurred to me that we could tease out an actual KPI from the search data. The trick is that some people come to the site from a search engine twice. If both of these searches are available then you have a measure of the visitor’s brand awareness before they visited the site, and after they have visited the site. I can think of a bunch of different ways to calculate it, but I think this is the best way:

Site Branding Impact = (% Branded second searches)/
(% Branded first searches for the segment that searched more than once)

This meets Eric Peterson’s requirements for a KPI, namely that it be a ratio of two numbers and that it measures something that you can actually change. It also turns out this number is pretty easy to get from WebTrend’s visitor history file, I’m sure other tools can do it as well.
Now, I realize that this is an imperfect metric. People who really remember the brand may remember the URL instead of doing a second search, or they may bookmark the page, or delete their cookies or whatever. The search engine rankings for branded and non-branded terms will change over time and skew the results. The big “but” here is that there are precious few other branding metrics that qualify for KPI status. Jason Burby wrote a ClickZ article about it today and I would argue that none of the measures he listed could really be boiled down into a single number. Given that there are few alternatives, I’ll take imperfect.
How can you impact this number? Well, two of our clients will be releasing new site designs within the next month. This seems like an ideal time to compare the site branding impact of the new sites with the old sites. I’ll let you know how it works!