Website Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Summary
Key performance indicators for your website are essential for you to determine focus and value. This page discusses why you need KPIs and how to use them effectively.
Your company website
Depending on the size of your company, different people (or different departments) will have an agenda for what they want from your company website. What they individually want may not seem relevant to you, but may be a very important to them.
Hence, there is a need for some clear objectives for your website that everyone can agree on to determine what is best for the company as a whole and so demonstrate value for your business.
Wikipedia: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are financial and non-financial metrics used to quantify objectives to reflect strategic performance of an organisation.
Metrics and focussed objectives
Another important factor of defined KPIs is that they allow you to focus your attention on achieving a set of pre-defined goals and help you avoid wasting time and money on other non-relevant returns.
Increasing the number of visitors to your website is great, but do those visitors fulfill your criteria for success? Whether that is buying something there and then, or signing up to your newsletter, you need to establish a valid return measurement.
15% "actions taken" on 50 visitors is better than 1% from 500.
Qualifying effective goals and defining your message will increase your return.
How to define your KPIs
The first thing that you need to do is establish a list of site goals and prioritise the things you want to achieve with your website. These may be to increase general traffic, generate leads, increase online sales or on the flip-side, reduce service telephone calls.
Your goals need to be specific and [essentially] they need to be measurable. You also need to bear in mind your target market and what they want. Why would they visit your site and what do they want (and get) from a visit? What's in it for them?
- Determine your site goals
- Ensure they are realistic
- Ensure that they are measurable
Pulling and pushing traffic
Establishing key performance indicators will allow you to develop your website accordingly.
For instance, if you run an offline campaign, you should localise your online drive by giving a specific web address landing page (eg. www.the-escape.co.uk/campaign1) on your material.
This 'landing' page can then be designed with the objective in mind by using a clear and focussed message.
One thing you can guarantee is that not everyone will land on your home page. (The home page of The Escape website accounted for just 39.20% of entry page landings for July-September 2006). This means you can add more focussed messages in areas of your site without affecting the 'general' message. This will increase the chance of your specific goals being reached.
Examples of KPIs
- Number of online sales
- 'Contact Us' form submissions
- Number of downloads for a specific document (eg. case study or report)
- New account sign-ups
- Article/press release views
- Newsletter signups
- Service enquiries answered online
- Returning visitors
Summary
A good company website delivers value. With defined website key performance indicators, you can measure your return effectively and focus your spend. Google Adwords is a good example of this as it demonstrates the cost of a visitor and also (more importantly) the cost per visitor to deliver a defined result. You can ascertain whether your spend is delivering the result you want cost-effectively.
Do not expect to get it right first time. The more you challenge your goals and make them more specific, the more you can re-establish the way your site works and the messages you have on your site. By measuring the actions that visitors take on your website, from landing page to goal completion, the more you can work out all the bottle necks and increase your success rate.
