Choosing Your KPIs

A guide to Google Analytics and developing an in depth measurement strategy.

It seems rudimentary but measuring performance requires data. Most business owners boil down their KPIs to a couple metrics but don’t properly analyze the user journey that surrounds those numbers.

For instance – A doctor will use a stethoscope to identify heart and lung related problems. A responsible doctor will continue to check a patient’s entire body until they are comfortable declaring them fit. If a doctor only monitored heartbeat then they would be neglecting their patient’s health and possibly endangering them with a false sense of security.

Like the doctor in the example, in order for a website owner to properly address the pain points on their website they will require a deeper analysis and understanding of their property. To accomplish this they will require an analytics suite, in this case we are using Google Analytics because it is free and effective.

Developing an Analytics Plan

When optimizing a website – or anything for that matter. It is imperative to create a methodology that allows you to make incremental improvements to smaller pieces of your website. By improving your website in blocks you will slowly build up to a large performance boost.

A good example strategy would be to arrange the lowest hanging fruit first, then systematically move on to the lower impact problems. To begin arranging your problems you may want to work backward from your ultimate goal.

For an ecommerce website a sale or transaction is typically the goal. You want users to convert with as high of an order value as possible
For a service website, you want to state your value proposition as clearly and persuasively as possible and have the user complete a form or call a number
For a content website you want to drive engagement – this would require a mix of metrics like the
- bounce rate – to measure the relevance of your content
- average time on page – for measuring the engagement with page types
- average visit duration – for overall engagement
- pages per visit – to measure how deeply into your website the user will travel

Tactics for determining your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

After establishing the primary metric(s) it is important to isolate the touch points that contribute to a purchase. A good way to organize the priority of what you would like to pay attention to on the site would be to split it out by your websites business goals.

Analytics to action for Sales:

Product detail pages (PDP)
- Add to bag clicks
- Visits to the page
- Conversion Rate (clicks/visits)
Category pages
- Clicks to product pages
- Quick Add to bag (if available)
Home page
Clicks to links on homepage banner
Clicks to featured categories/items
Checkout
- Measuring the “onblur” event to track form abandonment (an onblur event is when a user clicks into a form field, then leaves it)
- Tracking how many visitors drop off from shipping to confirmation
- Tracking the final confirmation button

Analytics for Email Signups and Appointment Booking

Measure account signup (many brands opt in their signed up users for email
Measuring form submissions
Measuring the “onblur” event to track form abandonment (an onblur event is when a user clicks into a form field, then leaves it)
Measure the entry points to the email signup experience
- Opt ins during account signup
- Where users are entering the signup page from
Review the analytics from your ESP (email service provider) to check the CTR (click-through rate) and compare against industry averages available to establish goals
Make sure that your emails are tagged with Google campaign tracking codes to measure users that enter your website from emails

For an ecommerce website it may range from simple to complex depending on the breadth of inventory available. For example an ecommerce site with 5 items available would benefit from focusing on the navigation experience whereas a retailer with thousands of items would want to button up their internal site search.

Learn more about how to create a google analytics event or a campaign tracking tag below:

Testing Your Ideas

As a follow up to your analysis you should consider testing tools to experiment with a better web design. Google offers a free tool that accomplishes the rudimentary testing goals but there are many powerful and worthwhile testing options available.

Learn more about Google Content Experiments here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?hl=en&ref_topic=1745207&rd=1

Remember – when analyzing your website traffic to put yourself in the users shoes and think about why they are taking the paths that they do.

If you would like to learn more about SEO, web analytics, or user experience as it regards to your website and Truvisibility you can learn more at http://www.truvisibility.com/en/blog. If you are interested in trying Truvisibility out today simply go to truvisibility.com and press the “Get Started” button, it is free and easy.