Metrics News & Articles

If there were a way to know how many Facebook fans or Twitter followers were needed to convert a sale, social media wouldn’t be such a hard sell to companies. Yet, as we know, social media is much more than Twitter and Facebook, and your return on investment is much more than dollars earned.

We don't need to tell you that social media is where a lot of the action is these days. KickApps (news, site), a social media publishing solution making its way around the Web, recently announced that they exceeded their goals and expectations for *all* business metrics during the first half of 2009.

Specifically, KickApps more than doubled their recurring revenues from their hosted services as compared to 2008. Additionally, the company added over 25,000 new clients during the first half of 2009, nearly 40% of which are reportedly non-U.S. based organizations.

“The demand for our products and services has never been stronger and we’ve seen an accelerated adoption from businesses of all sizes that are looking to KickApps to achieve deeper levels of engagement with, and insight into, their audience, customers and partners,” said Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps. “In a very short period of time, we’ve evolved this industry from where social media was a mere bolt-on to an existing web site experience to it being baseline functionality and one of the most effective and efficient ways in which to grow audience, and develop new revenue streams and online marketing channels.

As for the second half of the year, KickApps plans to continue to expand its solutions for web publishers, media and entertainment companies, Fortune 500 brands and small businesses. With numbers like the ones they've been keeping, we're going to guess that they'll see even more success in the next five months. Keep watch with us here.

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us.

It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.

Are you curious about the exact click behavior of your website visitors? Yes, well, you are surely not alone.

Going beyond server log files and the latest Google Analytics facelift, a new SaaS application has sprung up, delivering a very visual representation of the paths your users travel and the clicks they take along the way.

The main U.S. newspaper auditing group, Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), has announced that it will now include newspapers’ print, online and combined readership figures in its biannual reports, citing that “the numbers are a key factor in negotiations on newspaper advertising rates between newspapers and marketers.”

In one of their stellar new reports analyst firm CMS Watch recently reviewed Google Analytics, a free offering that shares the Google characteristics of a simple, effective UI and quick adoption by earnest early adopters.

What’s the verdict? While pretty, it’s insufficient to meet enterprise analytics needs.