What Gets Measured Gets Done

April 15, 2011 | by Chrissie Alquinta | Posted in Web Strategy

One surefire way to get someone’s attention is to tell them that they’ve just lost (or gained) $1 million. Or $1,000 or even $100. Money talks. This is especially true if that someone is a member of senior management who just made a substantial investment in a redesigned website. Not only do they want to see results, but they want to see them in terms of things they can understand. Most managers speak the language of bottom-line results, i.e. money lost or gained.

To be able to show results like this (results that are tied to business outcomes), it is important to have analytics set up for your website and to establish a web metrics measurement model. The one we use for clients is adapted from Avinash Kaushik’s model, which is shown below.

Although it looks complicated, it is actually quite simple. Just follow the four steps outlined below and you’ll be well on your way to tracking and analyzing your website’s effectiveness:

• Step 1. Define measurable business objectives. Business objectives answer the question, “for which purposes does my business exist?” Thinking through and establishing business objectives help set you on a clear path towards defining goals and indicators that are in line with your business outcomes.
• Step 2. Establish a structured set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that define expected outputs (i.e. goods, services and results) generated by the project. Bonus points if you can define the anticipated impact on business outcomes. Targets and baseline values should be recorded for each KPI.
• Step 3. Ensure that institutional arrangements are in place for gathering, analyzing and reporting data. Make sure you have a dedicated resource for this job or hire someone to do it for you.
• Step 4. Agree upon proposals for the ways in which data analysis findings will be fed back into decision making. Otherwise, you’re just a hamster on the data analysis wheel. Always running, but never going anywhere. Recommendations should be made from each data analysis exercise and used to make improvements to the site that will further improve business outcomes.

I’d love to hear from you out there in the trenches. Have you set up a metrics tracking plan? How did you successfully measure your project’s outcomes?