Marshall Sponder had some thoughtful feedback on my newsletter this month on unifying Web metrics. Marshall agreed that metrics are too hard to measure accurately right now, and added some more depth to how hard it is to know whether someone is qualified to see your promotional offer and how tough it is to figure out how many times your blog gets read.
After reading Marshall’s concern about my statement that “Until something better comes along, we can make the simplifying assumption that the impressions of your blog posts in blog readers are equal to your number of subscribers,” I realized that I had not been clear in the original post. What I was trying to say was that you can make the assumption that whatever number of subscribers you have is the best surrogate we have for blog impressions. The way I wrote it, it sounded like the reverse (use your blog impressions to estimate subscribers). What I was trying to say is that because so many blogs are read within RSS readers with no clicks to the blog Web site, the (admittedly poor) estimates we have of number of subscribers is the best guess at how many impressions each blog post gets. Yes, I know that it’s wrong, but it’s better than nothing. I suggested later in my newsletter a few ways that we could refine the estimates of all of these counts to be more accurate.
Thanks to Marshall for pointing out an area were I was not being clear. You can check out all of Marshall’s thoughts at WebMetricsGuru.
More thoughts on unifying Web metrics
