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.
(more…)
