Don’t be tainted by contaminated performance measures. To improve your website’s performance, it is important to use a variety of metrics. One such metric that is often overlooked is the number of visitors who have abandoned their shopping cart before completing a purchase. This has a direct correlation with conversions and can make a huge difference in your bottom line. It’s time to stop being tainted by contaminated performance measures!
It doesn’t matter if you are an individual trying to get more done or managing a team for one company or many; everyone wants reliable information from which they can draw conclusions about how well they are performing at what they do – whether as students, employees, professionals, entrepreneurs, investors or simply people looking for a way to measure their own progress.
It’s important, then, not only to use a variety of metrics but also to be aware of how your chosen metric is computed and what it actually measures so that you can avoid being tainted by contaminated performance measures.
The most common example of this might be found in the realm of marketing where people often make decisions based on total impressions or clicks rather than conversions. It’s understandable why they would do this – after all, campaigns are expensive and time-consuming endeavors with no guarantee for success. But if a campaign does succeed (by generating a conversion) while another doesn’t because its higher number may lead some marketer(s) to assume there was greater traction even though there wasn’t? That could cost a company a lot of money.
So, what is the best way to avoid this? Filter for conversions at every stage and only pay attention to impressions or clicks if they are converting well enough on their own merit (i.e., exhibiting conversion rates that exceed your target).
For example, you could provide a visitor with two options – either click here or watch the video first in order to learn more about our product line. The conversion rate would be 100% because both choices will eventually lead back into the funnel but it’s something worth thinking about when creating an offer as opposed to blindly choosing which metric seems better without understanding how it’s calculated.
A performance measure is said to be contaminated when information related to it (i.e., impressions, clicks) can’t provide a true reflection of the company’s success because they are distorted by a third party with an agenda not in line with the company’s goals. There are many ways that this could happen so one way for companies to avoid being tainted is by paying attention only to conversions at every stage and filtering out all other metrics from consideration until conversion rates exceed their target rate. For example: if you want people who click on your ad or visit your site but don’t convert then those numbers will needlessly inflate what should be easily measurable data points like conversion rates – which would make them impossible to filter out later without having already wasted valuable time and resources.
A performance measure is said to be contaminated when information related to it
Performance measures are never perfect. Such imperfections can arise from a lack of measurement capability, data errors, or biases in the population being measured. But what if we have good reason to believe our measurements might not be accurate for various reasons? Should that make us abandon them altogether? No! We just need to figure out how tainted they may be and act accordingly. That’s why I want you to learn about this concept of a “contaminated measure” and its implications on your organization’s assessment practices so as to avoid falling victim yourself.
In many cases, there are two types of contamination: intentional misrepresentation by someone who has knowledge of a dishonest measure or unintentional misrepresentation by a lack of knowledge. In either case, the contamination can be removed through corrections and adjustments to make it reflect true performance levels.
The first step in assessing whether your measures are contaminated is ensuring they accurately represent what you’re trying to measure (e.g., do we have data on how much each person actually contributed?). Consider asking for an audit if there may be errors in any part of this process that could impact the measurement accuracy including who did the work being measured, when it was done and where it was done. If necessary, develop processes to ensure these steps are followed consistently so inaccurate measurements don’t happen again
First, a performance measure is said to be contaminated when it doesn’t accurately represent the desired outcome. This can happen in any number of ways including a lack of knowledge; for example, not understanding what data needs to go into developing or maintaining a given measure. The contamination can also occur because there are errors in how we collect and/or analyze the data used as input from an inaccurate source such as human error (e.g., recording too many hours worked)
