Identifying Business Goals and Selecting Metrics

Case Study:

Company Background:

CompanyEC (CEC) is a Dallas Texas based creative services company, which markets mainly to online consumers.  Its website has loads of content and offers services such as web design, graphic design, web marketing and dimensional and digital art. CEC’s website receives over 12,200 page views per month and their revenue model is advertising based. Their monthly online revenue is approximately $27,000.

CEC’s stakeholders have a little understanding of how well the website is performing. This includes the effectiveness of ad placement in driving in lead traffic. In addition, Currently CEC uses multiple analytics tools such as Google Analytics and JoomlaStats to monitor site visitors and page views.

Needs Identification:

In sitting down and identifying the needs of the company, we were able to establish a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to the company and its CEO. We have narrowed this list down to 3 major metrics in order to truly provide a clear picture of how the website is performing.

CEC has 2 major needs:

• The ability to measure its Return on Investment (ROI)
• Measuring its websites effectiveness in order to generate revenue

In speaking with CEC’s CEO, we have determined that the KPIs will be:

• Average time a user spends on the site – To help measure how visitors are interacting with site content.
• Unique visitors – to measure potential revenue and ROI (if these visitors were to convert)
• Ratio of local audience to national audience – to measure which areas CEC needs to aim most of its marketing campaigns.

Tracking KPIs

Being that CEC mainly focuses within the online market, it is crucial that the company has some form of analytics set up within its website. Without analytics, it is difficult and near impossible to measure the true effectiveness of the website in order to improve the business’s bottom line. The fact is that without using analytics to monitor its website and company, CEC is making decisions blindly.

My first recommendation for CEC is to get a full understanding of which aspects of Google Analytics and JoomlaStats are most important to the company for reaching its goals and resolving its needs. It is also recommended that when implementing its analytics code, that CEC use meaningful page names. This method will allow for a more intuitive understanding when reading the analytics reports. Currently, not all pages meet these requirements.

Strategically using KPIs

After reviewing our analytics report, we can confidently make a conclusion about the sites current performance and identify actionable items that will help improve the KPI going forward. We can start be looking at the average time a user spends on the site. This report will be able to help us measure how visitors are interacting with the sites content. If we dig deeper, we should be able to see which pages are creating the longest stay and conversions and which pages users are not finding to be relevant toward their search. If we dig even further, we can begin to see which pages users last visited before abandoning the website.  If we see a common trend of user activity, we will be able to make the corrections as needed.

The other two metrics, unique visitors and ratio of local audience to national audience will be important to CEC because it will help CEC understand how engaging the website content is. These 2 metrics are also useful in helping with future marketing. With CEC having a true understanding of what its visitors are looking for, it will be able to advertise on relevant websites to accumulate more leads, which will lead to increased ROI.

CEC should take its KPIs and set up dashboards within its analytics programs to stay on top of its stats. This will help in analyzing trends and identify follow-up actions. This can also be done manually by exporting numbers from the analytics tools into Excel or customized dashboards within the analytics software.

The company’s KPIs should be revisited and fine-tuned often in order to remain relevant in an ever-changing marketplace.