Rise of the KPI

I was reading an interesting Marketing Sherpa article that summarizes top marketers analytics frustrations and had a couple of thoughts.

Check out the article here...

The second frustration listed in the article discusses the wealth of information and how such a small amount of it is useful. This is the place where I think some SMBs gets overwhelmed.

The article goes on to discuss how Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) can help you decide what information is worth tracking and measuring. This is where the playing field levels considerably.

The truth is that you don't need a huge analytics platform to measure against most of your KPIs. If you understand what impacts visitor behavior and how you can measure that you are already half way home. Something as simple as "average depth of visit" can be a truly telling statement if you run an ecommerce website that has a defined purchase conversion funnel. If buying the red widget takes 5 steps to complete an order and your average depth of visit is 2 pages...you have a serious problem.

Its important to approach analytics in order...

1. Do an audit of your business and revisit the goals you had for the website when you built it.
• Revisit that website RFP and proposal from when you had the website built. Are the business goals the same today as they were then?
  
2. Spend concerted time understanding the website and the actual process of taking action.
• Its amazing how many SMB's don't actually know what is involved for their customers to take action on their website. Reintroduce yourself to your website and get familiar with how you expect your users to find and interact with it.
  
3. Understand what impacts that behavior
• Is the online demonstration too long?
• Are there too many steps to purchase?
• Did search traffic lead to increased revenue?
  
4. Open up your analytics tool and find the metrics that measure that behavior
• Time spent on page
• Average depth of visit, exit pages
• referrers
  
5. Create dashboards that track those metrics

If you do any of this out of order - you might find that you are tracking things that aren't really actionable and therefore an inefficient use of your time. Spending time fully understanding your business and its online presence will make all the difference.