In my version of an ideal world, every new website development would start with a definition of the marketing objectives for the site. These, in turn, would be described as a series of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that were meaningful to the business in question. At this point key areas of the website could be specifically designed with the KPIs in mind.
The KPIs will comprise a number of different behaviours of website visitors. Some will be relatively high level such as:
* Totals of Unique visitors
* Source, Medium and Geographic origin of visitors
* Entrance page bounce rate
* Goal completions – Callback requests, contact form completions, newsletter subscriptions
* Tracked events – document downloads, video views
* etc.
….. others will focus on:
* Brand related search volumes
* Sales volumes (for ecommerce sites)
* Paid search and email campaign performance
* Visits originating from social sites
* etc.
The means to record all of this information and much more besides is core to ensure that a robust measurement and analysis capability is available to provide continuous tracking of the website’s performance against the defined marketing objectives.
The benefits that arise are significant, the focus of attention will be the visitors that truly engage and not simply the volumes of visitors that pass through. A useful parallel might be to think in terms of profitable revenue rather than just revenue.
