And the same thing goes for quarterly reports. They are unreadable. Boring! Bleech! So I was thinking, maybe we should have some sort of graphic? Like if we have a bad quarter we put in storm cloud. And, when we have a good quarter, fireworks or a race car." —Michael Scott, NBC's "The Office."

This quote illustrates why "The Office" is the most brilliant TV comedy since, well, the British version. It provides me an entertaining lead-in to a post on somewhat dry topic: Web Metrics.

Recently, I've been helping a number of organizations with their web metrics strategy. Unfortunately for too long, "web metrics" has been synonymous with "web traffic metrics" and its assemblage of visits, page views, and bounce rates. These are the numbers that organizations most often look at since they come for free with their web hosting plan. And unlike Michael Scott, some organizations are not thinking carefully about how information should be presented.

We encourage web teams to diversify their measurements and identify:

• Which metrics, within the context of organizational objectives are actually useful?
• For whom?
• How often?
• In which format?

One of the common outcomes is the realization that traditional traffic metrics are merely supplemental to other success measures. Yes, it's important to know the answers to these basic questions: What is the general volume of visits on your site? How many visitors are coming and how often? Which pages are most popular? And — when planning new site development — how capable are your visitors' computers? These are all useful information for web teams. (And for those organizations engaged in pay-per-click or other online advertising, traffic metrics can provide important insights.)

But these standard traffic numbers provide a superficial view of your site's activities. Just because something can be easily measured doesn't mean it's instructive. For instance, how does one value total daily visits in which half of those represent single page visits? That makes about as much sense as tying success to an increasing volume of phone calls placed to its main phone number. It makes even less sense if a large number of those are wrong numbers.

Other measures that may be more useful — particularly to the executive team include the number of registrants, community logins, comments posted, online event participants, actions taken, donations made, online purchases made, etc. Most of these are not in standard web reports.

Moreover, if metrics are to provide insights into progress toward furthering the organizational mission, as my colleague, Jim Cashel pointed out a few days ago in his post about social media, internet success is increasingly measured by the volume of activity happening on other sites.

Therefore, many organizations may need to look at external measures such as links in, blog mentions, YouTube video plays, RSS reach, Technorati Authority, Facebook friends, mentions on news aggregation sites, comments posted on other sites, and similar.

How does one distill and prioritize all of this?

Here's the basic outline of our approach. It's a seven-step program:

1. Identify and prioritize measurable strategic objectives.
2. Identify and prioritize the universe of available metrics — internal and external. Attempt to match each to a strategic objective from step 1.
3. Set baselines, targets, and comparators. (Ask: Where are we now? Where do we want to be? By when? What are our competitors' numbers?).
4. Identify the specific internal audiences for metric reporting.(e.g. Web Team, Communications, Development, Marketing, IT, Board of Directors, etc.).
5. Match the metric to its audience and its objectives.
6. Determine how often each metric should be reported to each audience.
7. Finally, determine the format for the final report or dashboard. Each report or dashboard view will match an audience.

This final report should be dressed up with tables and graphs that show trends over time and comparisons with external organizations.

So Michael Scott is right about one thing: Time-pressed executives do like the information presented in with clear visuals. We just need to be sure that the pictures don't just illustrate fireworks, but actually show progress toward organizational objectives.