Identify your key business driving metrics

The easiest way to identify a simple web metric is ask yourself what you want visitors to your website to do.

More than likely if you are selling a product your ultimate goal is that they should buy one of these products. If you are selling a consulting service you would like them to make contact with you. If it’s a community then perhaps you would like them to make contact with others, start a discussion or invite some friends to your community. And if you are a non-profit or government agency you may want to ensure a certain amount of awareness is raised on an issue and therefore want visitors to read certain texts or consume certain media on your site.

All of these different types of websites have different desired actions for their users so the measuring point will be different. And it will also have a different value depending on the margin on your product, your cost to get users to that page and so on.

A business metrics exercise

So, take a minute and make a list of all of the actions you want users to carry out on your site. When you’ve made the list start to filter it and put the most important user actions for your business at the top. Now you have a list of metrics which should help you start to plan your marketing and business.

Who analyzes web data?

Funnily enough it’s still not commonplace that corporate websites use analytics tools.

This is probably because most of the time you need to be able to easily paste a code into your html or on the server side and this is beyond the capabilities of some site owners. Even in larger companies we have seen a clear lack of tracking visitors.

Now a lack of tracking suggests a lack of analysis. But for the companies who do have tracking installed, some of them must be analysing their stats and visitor behaviour so that they actually know what’s going on.

Who does the full Monty?

Aanndd.. here’s the killer question: of the few who are using technology to track user behaviour, how many do you think are doing something about what they have found out. In other words, making changes on their site based on hard data and their new assumptions to try to increase their ROI?

The answer is rather hard to pin down. But the divide between what is spent on technology to analyse data, and then using some grey matter to either draw assumptions or act on the results of the data is 45/55 as indicated by this report. So if 45% of web analysis budgets are spent on tracking data, and only 55% on implementing changes based on info gathered when many tools do not cost an awful lot, what does that suggest to you?

For us it suggests an opportunity.

Just imagine if you were to reverse the equation and be one of the few players acting on the data you gather and your subsequent insights.