Re: omg I'm just a startup, I can't do those fancy analytics!

Rajat — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:26:52 -0000

To put things into perspective, I have tried to give examples of the granularity to which you can go for measuring your performance + size of the company (at which it is realistic to expect).

Disclaimer - This is my personal experience, so it may differ greatly for you.

For startup, highest level metric is -
Revenue, Expense, Money in bank left.

2nd level is - This is required for most startups (>2 employees)
Revenue -> 1-3 major revenue sources and what they are doing WOW, MOM (if your revenue is directly tied to traffic coming to your site, then you must have a number for traffic)
Expense -> Break it into 1 to 3 major costs - hopefully, tied directly to revenue lines (may not be from an accounting perspective but from a team setup, it is ideal).

3rd level -> Companies with 10-200 people (pick an area that is the focal point for your company)

Assuming that revenue is directly proportional to traffic to your website (e.g. CPM/CPC advertising etc) -
Break traffic into channels -
1) Free Search
2) Sponsored Links
3) Email
4) Inbound Links - Affiliate, Datafeed, Referral
5) Direct
Measure WOW, MOM trends by each channel, measure overall Cost per visit, leads ($) per visit.

4th level - This is mostly for bigger companies.
Now at this level, you can analyze each channel in detail to decide where to invest your time and money + which ones have the highest potential to growth.

Lets pick a traffic channel say, Sponsored Links. Now, you can measure -
1) Life Time value for a channel - Most important metric in my view
If you don't have a mechanism or sufficient history to calculate life time value, measure the following (its better not to measure it then have it wrong).
2) Page Views per visit for the channel
3) Cost per visit for the channel
4) Revenue per visit for the channel

5th Level - Be a guru
Start looking at each channel DOD and determine user's click behavior, past and post activity etc to determine what you can do to keep and grow the customer base.

Bets of luck.

Re: 5 things that make your social network monetize like crap

Rajat — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:19:09 -0000

Andrew,

Great post !!!

Just to support your point, an online poster company spent $60K on Facebook and did $0 in sales.

On MySpace, Google ads received 3 clicks over 180K impressions in 1 week for few set of keywords ~ 0.001%. They may do optimization that gets 80% increase in CTR, but that is still too small to make them commercially viable.

SE, comparison shopping engines, niche aggregators work much better from CPC/CPM basis where users have implicitly declared that they are interested in your offering by coming to your website.

Rajat

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