Last Wednesday we hosted our second MeasurementCamp. It was very much a last-minute affair – we stepped in to host it after an appeal on Twitter the day before. Given the late arrangement it was a smaller crowd than usual, but at the same time it was intimate and very much like the first few MeasurementCamps – with fewer people we were able to hold it as a single discussion session.

I presented a case study on our recent Dunlop campaign, with a measurement-focused angle. The key learning was what we ended up measuring was different from the KPIs we had agreed at the start, owing to a change in circumstances – and that raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. For example, the audience for our Twitter activity in setting the record straight was in the tens of thousands, far less than the total audience for the blogs, but it was important to target them as they were in a chatty, lively community where misinformation has the potential to spread quickly.

We then had a breakout session where we talked about specific metrics, and how best to classify them. There was a consensus that different campaigns and clients need different metrics, but the question was raised of how to select them.

So we thought publishing this framework might be useful. The first classification – ‘traditional’ v. ‘social’ is relatively easy to make, but even then a ‘social’ metric varies from viewing a YouTube video to blogging about it. We then rate the metrics in terms of both engagement (how much effort a user puts in to an activity) and longevity (how long the effect of that activity it lasts):

Out of this you can start seeing how one might go about selecting the right metrics to best reflect the difference your work can make. If you are working on instant incidental awareness or viral spread, you can focus towards the bottom left, and if you’d push for a longer relationship-focused then you’d go for the top right where the numbers are smaller but the time and dedication greater. Of course, there is a lot of extra context that fits around this – sentiment, enthusiasm, trust, and existing relationships, which numbers alone cannot account for – but still we hope it helps frame better the different metrics out there and their relevance to your work.