Redesigning or building a website is a multi-faceted experience, filled with excitement and opportunity as much as risk and challenges. Ensuring success requires looking not only at the website itself, but how you’re going to get visitors there. Budgets are often spent crafting the ideal user experience without much attention given to how to maintain traffic and retain customers after the project goes live.
This is why establishing a holistic digital marketing strategy for your launch is key. And this process starts by establishing your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).
To do that, walk through these four steps:
1. Determine Site Goals
This is where you consider the purpose of your site. Are you looking to increase eCommerce sales, improve engagement with content, build loyalty, improve brand awareness, or generate leads? How you answer this question will help you define KPIs that are going to be required to measure site performance.
2. Define Goals by Site Type
Just as your goals are going to differ based on your site type, different KPIs will also be tailored to each one of these goals. To measure success, you have to track all the different actions that can lead up to those goals. For example, the goal of an eCommerce or retail site might be to increase revenue by a certain percentage. However, there are many KPIs that might contribute to the overall analysis of that goal.
3. Create a Tracking Strategy
Each goal and KPI you outline should be supported with a tactic for tracking it, as well as a tool you’ll use to gather that data. For eCommerce, your overall goal is to increase online revenue, and your KPIs may be things like revenue, total transactions, and average order value. To capture that transaction data upon checkout, you will need a tool such as Google Analytics. You can work closely with a digital analyst or an implementation specialist to determine technical specs for how you want to track all of these goals and KPIs for a more detailed outline.
4. Set a Baseline to Measure Success
To analyze your site’s performance, establish a baseline for measurement before you launch. These baseline metrics can differ from basic traffic, to time spent on your site, to improved conversion rates. Make note of any key events that could impact data before, during, or after your launch – like seasonal shifts or promotions – that could change your data.
Once you’ve established your website goals and a process to track them, you can take steps towards achieving them. To learn about next steps in the process, download our guide, “Ten Steps to Maintain Traffic and Retain Customers During a Website Redesign.”
