In today’s overwhelmingly digital world, it is increasingly difficult for brands to hone in on website goals and objectives that truly drive their business forward. There can be additional challenges when the business’ website data is not accurately tracked or, in some cases, there is an overwhelming amount of data to filter through.
Establishing analytics key performance indicators
Why establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for your website? In short, they help your business establish a measure for performance and track progress to your goals. They should be concise, measurable, and, most importantly, accurately tracked by your digital analytics tool, with Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics being the most frequently used tools. Typically, KPIs are selected by the business and its stakeholders with guidance from a digital strategist as well as input from a strategic digital analyst to ensure proper implementation on the website.
Frequently, businesses are quick to select the most obvious KPI for their websites without taking a step back and thinking about the overall website goal and the user’s path that leads to that goal. To establish KPIs, two questions typically need to be answered:
- What is your organization’s vision?
- What is your strategy for achieving that vision?
The Future of Big Data
With some guidance, you can craft a data platform that is right for your organization’s needs and gets the most return from your data capital.
These questions are usually best answered by the executive suite at a company and will help the analyst determine what website metrics will indicate whether they’re achieving the goals of that vision.
Reach beyond the obvious and track it
For lead generation sites, a KPI might be considered a quote request or contact form submission. For eCommerce sites, it will likely be revenue and order-related; a few examples include sales conversion rates, average order value, and gross margin. If you’re looking for more specific examples, check out our recent blog post, 8 KPIs to Drive Your Digital Marketing Strategy in 2019.
However, I encourage businesses to think outside of the box and truly consider all options aside from the obvious. Consider the user’s path leading up to that defined KPI. This path could reveal other important activities on the site that lead to a conversion.
For instance, perhaps there is a visualization tool on the site that’s frequently used by engaged visitors before they submit their contact information in a form. The business may not be aware of this if the analytics data is not being closely analyzed, including the visitor’s paths and the journey to what’s ultimately considered a conversion on the site. These actions could be established as ‘sub-KPIs’ – supplemental pieces of data that can give us additional clues if the main KPIs are not hitting their marks.
It’s also possible that engagement with the tools or sub-KPIs isn’t being tracked in the first place and needs to be added to the tracking plan in order to make this assessment. This is why it’s so important to have an established analytics tracking strategy with input from all stakeholders, to think beyond the obvious, and to have a qualified analyst to ensure the data is being tracked accurately.
Bringing it all together
To sift through the clutter or simply make sense of things, it can be helpful to have a partner that is well-versed in using analytics data to inform the overall digital marketing strategy. Digital strategy and analytics should be working hand-in-hand in order to deliver business value and truly impact your bottom line, whatever that may be.
Contact us to learn how Perficient Digital can help.
