Captain

Mashable has a basic but good primer on ways organizations can measure their effectiveness on the social web.

The article focuses on three key points:

• Funnel Analysis: Measuring Conversion Rates
  

  This is a way of measuring conversion rates, which is the lifeblood of all applications. The term “conversion rate” refers to the total number of visitors who came to a site, compared to the number of visitors who did a desired action (such as creating an account or purchasing an item).

• Engagement Tracking: Measuring What People Do
  

  Pageview tracking is becoming less and less relevant for many web companies. Instead of the basic unit of measurement being the pageview, they are starting to track more directly relevant things, like the actions people are taking.

• Visitor Retention: How Many People Come Back?
  

  You can think of Visitor Retention as a measure of how “sticky” your site is. What we’re really measuring is the percentage of people who come back again and again.

Give it a read. The lessons are important for all organizations: large, small, for-profit, non-profit.