My background is in ecommerce and Internet marketing. Over the years, I’ve used lots of online marketing channels (SEO, PPC, shopping engines, affiliate programs, email, display/re-targeting, social, etc.) to drive sales. I call myself a metrics-oriented or data-driven marketer because I base a lot of my decisions on the data I collect. As many people have said over the years, if you don’t track results, you’ll never know if you’re succeeding or failing.

Leveraging powerful analytics solutions like Google Analytics, Webtrends, Coremetrics, and Omniture over the last 15 years, I’ve attempted to track everything possible and made decisions based on a number of metrics.

In the ecommerce and Internet marketing world, there are general metrics which are interesting like page views, unique users, average order value (AOV) and marketing channel-specific metrics like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, etc.  Then there are meaty metrics like conversion rate, which combined with other metrics, lead to the bottom line: cost per acquisition (CPA), lifetime value (LTV), return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), etc. More recently, I ran a SaaS business called SingleFeed and started looking at retention waterfalls and cohort analysis as well as everything that our CRM and marketing automation systems had to offer.

In other words, there are lots of metrics running around in my mind.

And then I started working with Kontagent, and I was introduced to how gamers think about their world. It took me a while to grok the new world order of Farmville, The Godfather, and The Sims Social, but once I did, I realized that there’s a huge opportunity for ecommerce companies to take advantage of the metrics which drive social gaming upstarts. Continue Reading…