Today I went to a mobile marketing event where three speakers talked about user activation and retention, mobile engagement, and mobile fraud. The speakers shared great insights on what is new and important in these fields. But what interested me most was a question asked during the Q&A session after the second speaker was done. It went something like this: “What are some of the new metrics you are looking at other than churn, retention, user acquisition, etc.?”
The speaker readily answered that there weren’t really any new hip metrics they were looking at; at least not in his vertical. Both the question and the answer made me think: it really isn’t about what metrics are new out there, after all, it is the objective that defines your metrics.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest problems for companies and marketers. Instead of looking at what great numbers we can get, we should always ask first: is this a metric that is helping us understand whether or not we are getting closer to our goal?