Our Culture of Measurement

Posted by: Matt Shanahan

John Lovett has an interesting post Building a Culture of Measurement. The title and content caught my eye because it was embodied a big force behind the development of Demand Rating™. As John stated in his post, “Culture consists of values, beliefs, legends, taboos and rituals that all companies develop over time.” Below are some of our values and beliefs behind Demand Rating.

Scout Analytics set out to measure one of the most critical variables in sales, marketing, and product management: visitor loyalty. Our culture is marked by pursuit of an astonishingly simple measurement that has dramatic impact on results. The Demand Rating measurement was originally sparked from a book called How to Measure Anything and the following excerpts have directly shaped our culture:

Measurement is a set of observations that reduce uncertainty where the result is expressed as a quantity.

If it matters at all, it is detectable/observable
If it is detectable, it can be detected as an amount (or range of possible amounts)
If it can be detected as range of possible amounts, it can be measured

In business cases, only a few key variables merit deliberate measurement efforts.
The rest of the variables have an “information value” at or near zero.
In other words, most measurements do not reduce uncertainty.

Guessing which visitors represent the best revenue opportunities is still widely based on intuition and experience. It doesn’t have to be that way. Learn more about Demand Rating in this blog.