ONS Digital

Stephen Pavlovich talking conversion rate optimsation on mobile

MeasureFest is a new conference, put on by seasoned organiser @kelvinnewman. We’ve not worked together but I’d seen numerous references to MeasureFest pop up on Twitter so there was obvious interest in it (good sign) it was free (another good sign) and the skeleton agenda promised to cover some great stuff:

• Analytics vs Insight
• Attribution
• Conversation rate optimisation
• Customer value optimisation
• As well as the not so much online, but still very much part of the customer experience that needs to be measured, call tracking

All this an even better sign MeasureFest was going to be good.

A handful of the takeaways for me were:

• Outcomes at the heart of measurement and the business as a whole. This notion of outcomes (measuring users who have used our data) over output (number of visitors to a page) has been around a while but it’s always good to remember that that’s what matters over anything else
• Incremental vs big. Or in full, incremental changes for incremental improvements vs big changes for big improvements. This is obvious really but makes you take stock of what you’re doing to assess how much impact bits of work will have and whether they’ll meet the ultimate objective if there are big expectations
• UTM tagging and a clean structure for it are paramount for accurate goal measurement
• Attribution only focuses on acquisition, doesn’t cover retention or the lifetime value of a user
• Unique telephone numbers are still the way to track offline activity. Whilst we have one phone number for ONS, statisticians put their direct phone number on their publication. Calls to that should be tracked in the same way calls to our 0845 is.

Look out for the next MeasureFest in June.

Andrew Clark

(Head of Social Media)