Want to Measure ROI? Design it Into Your Digital Assets!

Measuring Digital ROI with Website Data; The Link Between Strategy and Design
Measuring the business benefit of a non-eCommerce website can be quite challenging. Basic “out of the box” metrics like unique visitors, visited pages, site visit duration and number of leads provide useful top-line data, but they don’t generate insights into how well a website is performing against strategic objectives.  For several years, the interactive marketing industry has been hitching its collective hopes on “engagement” as the ROI savior of Internet marketing measurement.  The concept elicits reactions ranging from evangelism to skepticism.  A recent whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified called Measuring the Immeasurable: Visitor Engagement goes to great lengths to provide an in-depth explanation of how to create general top-line measures of engagement, so I won’t belabor the concept further.  Instead, let’s shift the focus to key performance indicators for strategy execution.

A solid digital strategy identifies the ways the digital channel can be used to achieve broader strategic business objectives and outlines the criteria for measuring success.  In recent years, the interactive industry has placed much of its design focus on user centric design.  However, end user experience is not the only consideration that needs to be taken into account.  Detailed design decisions have a big impact on what metrics can be collected.  You need to design the site to produce the right metrics, a point that is lost on many interactive designers and design agencies.  A good design team will not proceed without a detailed understanding of business objectives.  An effective design team will design ROI measurement into a site.  Here are some typical business objectives, their design implications and some measurement recommendations for tracking and optimizing strategy execution.

While the nuances of each firm’s digital strategy will vary according to its industry, business model, competitive posture and customers, what follows is a framework for typical strategic objectives and their implications on site design:

1. Targeting Key Market Segments.  Best practices in effective website design call for personas as a design tool to represent targeted segments.  A good design team uses the personas to build scenarios for how the personas will interact with the site, then designs accordingly.  But what happens to personas after a website is built?  Often, the personas lie fallow and the question of how the new site is performing in reaching the targeted segments goes unanswered.  A better idea is to use personas as an ongoing performance management tool by documenting key persona scenarios then conducting visitor path analysis to analyze persona traffic.  One caveat is that real world visitors may not follow the exact paths the design team anticipated.  A second caveat is that detail path traffic trends can be very fragmented.  Instead of getting bogged down in complexity, keep it simple.  Create content with specific segments in mind then analyze visitors based on the type of content they access during their visits, not the sequence in which they access it.  The design implication is that content should be highly differentiated between personas.

2. Driving Purchase Consideration.  Most websites share the common goal of driving revenue, but what does this mean from a design perspective?  How can sites be optimized to drive more revenue?  The measurement starting point is identifying key user actions and events (i.e. outcomes) that can serve as proxy metrics for purchase consideration include accessing:
* a store locator (provides geographic insight as well)
* product or service comparison charts
* data sheets and detailed product or service information.
Visitor path analysis that backtracks from these successful outcomes will provide insight into the behaviors leading up to the purchase consideration event.  The insights can be used to create a predictive model that identifies key site paths to streamline and highlight so you can design to encourage purchase consideration.

3. Creating Customer Loyalty.  The immediate and obvious site loyalty metric is the distribution of the number of visits by visitor for a set timeframe.  If a high percentage of visitors access the site multiple times then that indicates site loyalty.  This should be a familiar table for users of Google Analytics, but it is a site focused metric not a product-centric metric.  A good way to foster customer loyalty is to provide content that helps people easily access your service on a recurring basis or to provide information that helps them increase the benefits they receive from something they already own.  Similarly, excessive activity related to troubleshooting and problem-solving can be an indicator that people are having difficulty with a product.  Visits to information about accessories or add-ons can also be interpreted as relevant to share of wallet.  Measuring and tracking these will help create a loyalty index.  Most sites skew toward customer acquisition, not product success or service use.  Consider the needs and interests of current customers in your design and think through how the designs will support measuring their activity.

4. Fostering Advocacy.  Social media tagging tools provide a way for website owners to facilitate advocacy in cyberspace.  Some bloggers have done an excellent job of making their sites readily accessible to sites like del.icio.us and digg by including the relevant widgets.  Interestingly, most branded websites totally omit these simple additions.  Adding them enables you to track activity.  You can also track the number of tags for your website at these sites using functions they provide like the delicious url lookup and tools like the Greasemonkey digg counter.

5. Reducing Cost to Serve.  Self-help is a good thing if self-help sessions are successful.  Success is in the eye of the user, so include a “did this solve your problem?” question at the end of every support listing.  Track and report on the responses to identify the types of content that help and where you need to overhaul.  Also track search activity to identify new support listings that need to be added.  Some companies are going so far as to make capacity decisions for their call centers by using their online help activity as an indicator of self-service adoption.  They are decreasing headcount as online volume increases – a direct contributor to the bottom line and ROI.

6. Accelerating Revenue.  New product introductions create a golden opportunity to track how quickly and effectively your company is creating awareness.  Measure traction and uptake by collecting metrics on new product or service views in a launch date + format (i.e. Day 1, 2, 3, etc.).   Building and tracking separate landing pages for new products and key marketing campaigns also create an opportunity to measure contribution from both digital and non-digital PR and marketing efforts.  Finally, integrating PR tracking (i.e. “earned media” or mentions) with site activity can provide a view of the contribution that PR and digital promotion is making.

Strategy creation, strategy execution, and measurement and analysis are all disciplines, they don’t happen by accident.  Having all three disciplines aligned and pointed in the same direction will go a long way toward answering the question: “Where’s my ROI?”