vour of more meaningful metrics tracked by free tools like Google Analytics. Among the preferred stats are Visits (the number of people who spent a minimum amount of time navigating a website), Pages/Visit (the number of pages viewed dur- ing a single visit to the website), Avg. Time on Site (the number of minutes the average person spent on the site during a single visit) and the oft cited Bounce Rate (the percentage of people who visited only one page on a site and then left). It’s also become important to measure how people ar-
rive at a website. Sources include search engines (in which case it’s important to identify the keywords that drove the traffic), site referrals (in which case it’s important to iden- tify which sites are linking to yours) and direct traffic (ac- cesses to your site via typed URL or browser bookmarks).
ACTIONS Perhaps the best way to measure success is incorporating
simple and specific calls to action in your campaign. Ex- amples include invitations for visitor to sign up to receive a newsletter, register to be a campaign volunteer or donate money. This is where digital metrics can really shine be- cause you can trace each to specific campaign goals as well as track return on time and financial investments.
Another easy-to-measure call to action is to create a specific web link that can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, in online advertisements, emails, etc. Clicks on that link can be counted and related to information about the refer- ring site. You can also measure how many people followed through with the action at the destination (such as actually donating money), growing your database as you go. Link-specific goals can be established and made part of the configuration in the measurement tools (remember Google Analytics). Online advertising tools also allow you to mea- sure the number of impressions (views) and clicks (follow- throughs) for your ad on a daily, or even hourly, basis. Just like the family road trip, you can paralyze yourself with measuring countless, even meaningless, elements of your campaign. You’ll find at some point the data just becomes noise. My best advice is to keep it simple. Focus on just a few metrics that assess tactics that support the communications strategy developed to achieve the campaign goals. I think we can all agree the best measure of achieving the goal is getting the vote with the campaign team still intact.
Mark Blevis is the President of Full Duplex Ltd., an integrated digital communications, public affairs and research firm. His report Peace, Order and Googleable Government can be found on
http://markblevis.com.
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April 2011 | Campaigns & Elections 17
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