I know someone who has an issues-oriented Facebook page. They were plugging along with a couple of hundred followers and a few likes until they discovered how to use “memes” to be successful. For the record, “memes”, in social-media, are photographs, usually of people, with witty, often ironic captions.

Once the owner of this page started using memes, it took only a week to enjoy a 500% increase in followers and many, many more exposures via posting the meme to other relevant sites.

Commenting and overall involvement in the page skyrocketed.

It sounds like a small success story on Facebook. Facebook wants this.

Or do they?

Remember, Facebook made zero dollars on what I have described above.

It seemed at first a mystery that the ability for this page to post to other sites was suspended by Facebook for two weeks because others had reported it as “spam”. I know there was nothing mechanized nor unthinking about where the posts were put, so I know it did not fit the actual parameters of spam. I began to wonder how Facebook parses its data to figure out what is “spam” if such carefully orchestrated posting could seem that way. It is possible that some folks reported it to FB as spam but based on the content involved, I kind of doubt this.

Then came the offers from Facebook to the same suspended page-owner. “Do you want to buy ads?” was more or less their offer. In many ways, on different days, they repeated the same message: spend money with Facebook, dear “spammer”.

Does Facebook review its user base for very successful users who don’t spend money with them?

Do they then threaten them with being “spammers” until they start spending money with Facebook?

There’s no proof of course. And it’s very possible that the “watchdog” part of FB does not know what the “sales” part of FB is doing–quite conveniently!

But with mounting pressure on Facebook to make money, such abuses of their power over subscribers would hardly surprise me, should it turn out to be the case.

What’s your site? An Apple? A Banana? A Fish? An Oldsmobile?

I’m being facetious.

I’m really talking about site types, and how knowing the major categories can be a shortcut to defining what you really should be measuring. Site-type definition can eliminate hours of vague discussion between business owners and technologists about “what we need to know”.

Broadly, there are four site types. Just four. Not four hundred.

The first lesson in KPI Definition is this:

You are not unique.

Once you digest that perhaps surprising fact, the rest becomes somewhat easier. And of course we don’t mean you, personally, are not unique (your are!). We do mean your site is not so very much unlike sites like it that it cannot benefit from categorization.

The Four Site Types

We’re giving thumbnail sketches here: just FYIs. There are obviously lots more detail about these but this ought to pique your interest.

eCommerce

Especially important to eCommerce measurement is a concept known as “the sales funnel” in which users are brought to the site via campaigns, then engaged through a variety of content until the “buy” pages are reached. What you want to do is watch that funnel to see where it leaks.

Brand/Content

Brand and Content sites have very similar goals. Brand sites want users to interact with content to gain a level of comfort and kinship with the brand. Content sites sell advertising space. For both, the point is: users should spend more time on the pages.

Lead Generation

This type of site wants to encourage users to “get in touch”. You don’t have a “buy” button. You have a “contact us” button or the like. The goal is to nurture users so they want to enter your off-line sales cycle because your sale is completed off-line. A classic example of this is the real-estate (“contact broker”) site.

Self-Service/Informational

The Self-Service site is almost the opposite of the Brand/Content site. The idea is to get people to the information quickly and then have them move on to something else. Often this type of site involves a cost to the site owner per interaction. For instance, in a human resources department, you’ll want visitors to get their HR info quickly and get back to work! If you’re a subscription, you’re a little bit like a gym and its membership: come visit, but not too often and not all at once because we won’t able to handle that! So, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is partly about getting people to their information; but then getting them off before they waste your bandwidth.

That’s it! Those are the site types. It’s a starting point. Defining exact KPIs will take some work but the focus will be more narrow and the completion date will come sooner.

Recently I read an article in iMediaConnection about how social media agencies were in need of a warning about being too narrowly focused; and that social media is really very narrow a focus for any marketer.

But why are they called “agencies” in the first place? The reason the word “ad agency” became popular is because these companies made their money–after all the creative and the hoopla surrounding that–by purchasing advertising time or space, and then re-selling it to their customers. This is called being an “agent”. As in “Broadway ticket agent”: a person who buys blocks of tickets to hit shows and then scalps them–’scuse me, I meant re-sells them–to the public at a not-too-onerous markup. The traditional ad agency markup was, for a long time, around 17% and this went for everything the contracted for and re-sold.

Over the years the word “agency” took on a meaning apart from this and seemed to apply to anyone with a creative or marketing bent, a few corporate customers, and a loft-type office somewhere in the warehouse district of your local city. Agency people, over time, probably bought more from Starbucks than they bought from publications or networks. And after a while, they really weren’t “agents” much any more, but creative and marketing shops that “helped you with your marketing”.

Which is what (I believe) Social Media Agencies do. They don’t re-sell social media placement (except if you consider banners and ad-networks social media). In fact, since social media is not a “spot” to be purchased, they really cannot sell what can’t be bought. So they have to settle for influencing. And many have latched on to the words “social media” because it has been hot, hot, hot.

Except now maybe not, not, not? Are we not getting tired of saying those words? Do they really apply to the mix of marketing efforts needed for digital success these days? Are the days of so-called “social media agencies” drawing to a close?

With Facebook and Zynga and Groupon at historic lows and mobile conversion rates lurking like eels in the depths, it would seem the mighty white shark of social media has now devolved into a still large, but far less attractive, more bottom-feeding thing, perhaps a grouper or a catfish instead of a top predator.

And with this must come the recognition that social media really is just one of the legs under the chair, as business-folks love to cliche. It may even be an increasingly small part of the picture. Remember, it can’t be bought, it can’t really be controlled. It can only be influenced, and then only to a point where the influence starts to become obvious and starts to annoy.

Social media is a campaign, just like any other, and must be measured against conversion rates just like any other campaign.

Are “Social Media Agencies” due for a name change, if not a game change? Yes.

I’m impressed with the ability of web analytics tools to spot trends and identify success/failure modes. Really, I am. And if you are reading this, perhaps so are you.

But what I am totally not impressed with is the amount of inaccuracy and uncertainty many enterprises accept as “normal” even as they rely more and more on digital properties for marketing purposes.

The causes for uncertainty fall roughly into two main categories.

One: smaller companies lack the internal resources to test and verify their own analytics infrastructure. Lack of expertise and lack of exposure to best practices can hobble any chance at really understanding true traffic patterns. Often, marketers at smaller outfits simply “don’t know what they don’t know” and rely on generic implementations to present accurate data. Almost as often, that doesn’t really work.

Two: large enterprises suffer from fragmentation of effort. While expertise may be resident or available for purchase, there is rarely an analytics “ombudsman” who is charged with ensuring accuracy. Instead, accuracy is kicked back and forth between (usually) marketing, IT and in-house/third-party developers, with no group  in possession of both the raw technical skillset and the objectivity to make definitive statements about accuracy; nor the mandate to make recommendations towards better accuracy.

The result is that uncertainty and  inaccuracy afflict nearly every segment of the market.

Why this is bad:

-when you think your numbers are accurate but they are not, then you are making decisions based on false information.

-when you are pretty sure your numbers are inaccurate, you refrain from making decisions based on the numbers: thereby wasting the entire effort.

The cure really is rather simple in theory.

It’s called an “audit“.

An audit entails the following:

-a review of the desired reporting outputs

-a review of the current reporting outputs

-a thorough inspection of all tags, custom code, calls made to the analysis engine, action scripts, log files, url parameters and so on

-by an expert (!)

-a report with a spreadsheet showing what the page-level data capture schema should look like for every page and every dimension

-a detailed map of how this can be achieved (e.g. instructions for developers)

-extensive QA of the tags and parameters once the audit-recommendations have been implemented

-a final report to verify accuracy of reporting

Commonplace Problem

It gives me the shakes to think about how inaccurate data is so awfully common in the analytics world. It makes me slightly impatient (it’s a flaw of mine) to understand how simple it really is to perform an audit, and to compare that against how infrequently audits are typically performed.

My advice to all digital marketers is: if you have not done an analytics audit recently, get one done ASAP. It will help you sleep like a baby.