Best Practices of Effective Website Performance Measurement - Part 2

What’s Going On Online?

In my last blog, we reviewed how to have discussions with your stakeholders about what they’re trying to accomplish in terms of business goals. Now it’s time to track down what actually happens online that reflects the success (or failure) of those business goals. This is where we start thinking about connecting measurable website actions to the previously established business objectives.

Breaking Down Objectives Into Online Activities

Start with a brainstorming session between you and your stakeholder (marketer, business unit owner, etc). It should go without saying, but at least one of you should be reasonably conversant in the content and functions of your website. What you’re looking for here are the things visitors do on your website that map to your business goals.
For example, as a trainer at Webtrends, I want to get more people to register for classes. I need to think about the methods and incentives we have in place to drive people to register for a class. What processes do we have in place to encourage registrations, as well as the pages and forms that exist where registrations take place?
While establishing the various actions that happen on your website, think about how this will lead into reports. We will get into detail on reports and tagging in the next blog. It can be useful to keep that in mind while leading a discussion of website activities; especially for pages for actions that are already tagged and with existing reporting.

Bringing Stakeholders Along in Measurement Planning

Let’s revisit my theoretical analyst Tony and his three stakeholders from Stark Corporation to illustrate how stakeholder discussions can identify actions and reports.
Arya expressed a business goal of ‘learn what content is more engaging to mobile users.’ Hers is both the simplest and broadest example. When pressed for detail, it becomes apparent she wants to be able to see page traffic, pathing, form submissions, and a generalized ‘visit goal.’ She would like to know what her mobile users are looking at, if they behave differently and why they came to the site in the first place, especially in contrast to her desktop users. The good news is that many of these actions are straightforward—such as how many people came to a page. She just needs these actions for a specific segment of overall site traffic to understand and optimize the mobile experience.
If you’ll remember, Jon was wasn’t satisfied with the report he already had, a referrer report. He was looking to ‘easily determine new, organic traffic sources.’ In spending some time detailing what that means, it becomes clear he wants to know when there are new referrers to the website, but only when the Stark Corporation does not have a hand in directing that traffic. He is a little interested in traffic from search engines, but really wants to get to blog mentions and links. He really wants to focus on any companies out there linking to the website that might be good candidates for a partnership.
Finally, Sansa has the fairly common objective of needing to optimize her marketing campaign spend. She runs three major sets of campaigns (one for existing clients, one for driving sales from new clients, and one general ‘brand awareness’ campaign). Each campaign has different goals, and she struggles with measuring effectiveness of one versus the other – especially when her current reporting gives the same basic metrics for every campaign. She wants to know if visitors/users are eventually being driven to a purchase decision. Sansa also needs to know if existing clients are utilizing the tools and resources offered to them.
What we’ve accomplished here is connecting the actions on your website to exactly what our stakeholders want to measure. The next step is to find the right reports and ensuring you have the right tagging in place to measure effectively. Having these stakeholder discussions is a very effective way of getting their buy-in; and ensuring the reports you end up providing are the ones they really wanted, instead of something you thought they would need.