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One of the best things about a website is that almost every aspect of it's performance is measurable. With a little preparation, it is quite easy to set up and track a list of Key Performance Indicators that will show you whether your website is improving or not, and allow you to measure it's performance against your expectations. I am going to use an imaginary landscape gardening business “Gazzas Great Gardens” as an example to give you a few ideas on how you might set up and track your website's KPIs. Goals and expectationsGazza's Great Gardens has a simple brochure style website with a gallery of past work, and a simple contact form. Gazza hopes that visitors will come to the website, look at his past work, and be so impressed that they will contact him through the form, or call him directly. Gazza generates regular leads through word of mouth referrals, and can only handle about 4 projects per month, so he figures that if he can land one or two projects per month through the website he'll be very happy. Preparing the KPI spreadsheetBased on the information above, there are a few things that Gazza needs to track so he can assess whether his website is a success, or at least moving towards being a success. Firstly, he needs visitors. And specifically, he needs visitors who are interested in landscaping their garden. The first data column of Gazza's KPI spreadsheet will be unique visitors. This will just be the total number of unique visitors that find his website. The next column will be “Relevant Search Terms”. This is the total number of search engine queries that successfully found his website, and contained relevant search terms. In Gazza's case he'll have a list that looks something like this:
Once people are visiting his website he wants them to look around, so the next column will be “Average time on site” and “Average pages viewed per visitor”. Gazza wants people to fill in his contact form or call him, so the next column is the number of visits to his enquiry form (contact.html). e will get an email each time the form is filled out, so by saving each email enquiry in a separate folder in Outlook, he can quickly count these at the end of the month when he fills in his spreadsheet. Of course the final goal is to land a project, so Gazza tracks the number of quotes he writes from his website enquiries against the number of jobs that he actually lands, and that's it. Gazza is now tracking the following KPI's for his website.
Tracking this information will take Gazza about 30 minutes to an hour per month, and will give him a very real picture of whether efforts to promote himself online are working. How to use the dataNow that Gazza has a simple view of what's going on, he can make some changes and track whether or not they have the desired effect. Here are a few simple examples. Problem: Gazza receives 400 visitors per month via relevant search terms, but only 1 or 2 hits on the contact form page. Solution: Make the “Contact Us” button bigger. Result: Check the data over the next two months... Problem: There are more than 30 visits to the contact form every month, but only 1 or 2 visitors ever actually fill it out. This is very obvious stuff, but without the data in front of you, it is often very hard to see where the website is failing. By tracking each component we can create a chain of events that all lead to a final goal. SummaryGazza's Great Gardens is obviously a very simple example, but it illustrates the basic principles that are required to track your website's KPI's. Here's a simple to do list to get started.
KPIs for your website: Article by Tristan Boyd  RSS Feed
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