Your Business Will Define Your KPIs
Deciding what metrics you will choose as your KPIs will depend a lot on what your business does and the role of your website within that. What you measure for an e-commerce site, for example, will be almost entirely irrelevant to a blog site.
By and large, the purpose of an e-commerce site is to drive sales and revenue. So, for this site, you might look at Conversion Rates, Cart Abandonment Rates and Average Order Value. These measurements will give you plenty of detail in how your customers behave on your site and should highlight any issues your site may have. A larger than normal Cart Abandonment Rate, for example, might signal that your checkout process needs looking at.
For a blog site, you’d want to keep a close eye on how engaged your users are with your content. For that reason, you’d consider looking at Average Time on Page, and Pages Per Session. You should also be encouraging users to subscribe as well so monitoring the rate of this is also essential. If this is much lower than it should be maybe you need to assess how strong your Call to Actions are.
Things to Keep in Mind
Whilst that covers the majority of what you will need to know to define your objectives and KPIs there are some other factors you should take into consideration as well. Firstly, have a think about what tools you will use to measure and report on these KPIs. Google Analytics is the obvious choice for the vast majority, but you may also consider a heat map tool such as HotJar if you want to measure the proportion of people making it to the bottom of your page for example.
The other point is to keep focused and don’t go overboard. Measuring heaps and heaps of KPIs will just be time-consuming and only serve to confuse you rather than give you anything meaningful. Sticking under five will keep the data clear and the reports concise. This will also help you to prioritise what the really important metrics are.
As we’ve already talked about on a previous blog, a website without a purpose is a huge no-no. Keeping a close eye on the purpose and objectives of your website means figuring out the most appropriate measures, or KPIs. They should be specific, highly relevant, and quantifiable. Anything other than that and you’re just looking at numbers on a page. A strong set of KPIs will help you to keep your website at the top of its game for as long as possible. And everybody wants that.
If you want talk about setting and smashing your own KPIs, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch today.