Best Practices for Highly Effective Websites

Page views. Visits. Time on site. When marketing teams sit down each month to review web performance, these are often the key performance indicators they talk about. But, as a business, what are you really trying to do? Does anyone’s job really hinge on the number of visits last month?
While there are many data points that add color to performance measurement and analysis of web or mobile or social, what really matters are the business goals: new sales, event registrations, etc. In this four part blog series, we’ll take a look at what a more effective website performance measurement process can look like, highlighting examples of techniques to infuse interesting analytics insights into your business.

Establish Clear, Measureable Goals

What should the performance measurement process look like? Generally, it starts in a conference room with key stakeholders. The goal is to have a discussion with the team about what they are trying to accomplish. It is important to identify the business goals the team is tasked with reaching.
Sometimes stakeholders say their goals are vague such as, ‘we want to increase engagement with our visitors’ or ‘increase awareness.’ What does ‘engagement’ mean? Who are you trying to engage and why?
If you’re faced with vague goals from stakeholders, try this approach: Ask the team what would happen if you unplug your website or intranet tomorrow. What’s the result? Who would freak out? Let’s say you estimate technical support calls increase four-fold. And, revenue drops by 40 percent without your ecommerce site. Employees can’t manage their withholding and HR needs to do it manually with paper forms. This ‘what if’ approach can really help clarify what’s important to the business.
I’ve also been faced with ‘business goals’ that are really just website activity. We’ll get to the website, but that’s step 2. Visits to the website don’t (directly) affect my business, and form submissions isn’t a business metric. We need to bring our measurement back to a business factor. How does that activity fit into a larger business context? Why are we counting visits or form submissions?

Objective Setting isn’t a Game

For an example of this, let’s look at my theoretical client, the Stark Corporation. Tony the analyst approaches three stakeholders about what they’re trying to do. The first stakeholder, Arya, is concerned with mobile traffic. She wants to know how to engage with mobile users better, but only currently has a count of them and a list of browsers they’re using. Jon wants a better version of the referrers report and Sansa is barely using her campaign reporting.
Arya already has a pretty good business goal there. You could say ‘better optimize the mobile experience’ or ‘learn what content is more engaging to mobile users,’ but she’s on a good track.
In discussing the referrers report with Jon, it’s apparent he hates how much work he has to put into looking through it to find what he wants. As the partner manager, he’s looking for new, organic traffic sources, and the referrer report has a lot of the same data every week. As a business goal, we eventually settle on just that: ‘easily determine new, organic traffic sources.’
Finally, Sansa says she gets the same campaign data from her vendors, so why look into the Webtrends reports when the vendors sending the emails can tell her about how many people clicked on a link in an email. In talking to her about general business goals, it is quickly apparent she is trying to optimize her campaign spend and that’s what we will run with as her business goal.
As you can see, stakeholder conversations are critical, as is holding them to measurable, actionable business goals. Using best practices in performance measurement will help you and your team gain a deeper understanding of your business, help you make smarter business decisions and deliver more valuable data.
In the next part of this series we will work though translating these generalized business goals into specific website activities.