Digital Strategy Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There are many Indicators of your website’s performance and the digital marketing channels, which drive traffic to your website. But the main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which directly affect your bottom line are far more manageable. The main KPIs are:
Traffic, Conversion Rate (CR), Average Order Value (AOV), Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR)
If you improve any one of these KPIs, you make more money, garner more interest and spread the word even more. Let’s break each of those KPIs down because if you have a Business-to-Business website offering instead of an ecommerce offering, there’s a slightly different way of looking at it…but the KPIs stay virtually the same.
Traffic
This is the obvious one, more traffic means more interest. The more relevant that traffic the more likely it will positively affect the other KPIs.
Conversion Rate
For an ecommerce store conversion rate means a sale. If it’s a business-to-business website than it means a ‘lead’ or an ‘action’. We deem an action to be one of the following:
- A phone call
- A quote request form
- An enquiry form
- A download (brochure or white paper)
You can of course add the above actions to an ecommerce website’s KPIs as well, especially if the Average Order Value (AOV) is high and it’s a more ‘considered purchase’.
Average Order Value (AOV)
AOV denotes the checkout basket size of any sale. There are ways to encourage orders to be bigger, such as Free Shipping or upsell at checkout (or even after checkout). Again, for business-to-business this would refer to the Quality of the Lead.
The Quality of the Lead is everything, sending you traffic is not hard, dare I say it you could even ‘buy’ traffic (never recommended). Sending you quality traffic is an art. So, monitoring the quality of business-to-business traffic is another KPI, which we do with a simple WhatsApp group with your sales team for feedback on the quality. It’s also an opportunity to reduce the chaff and improve and re-allocate budget for your target audience as we learn from your feedback.
Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR)
While this doesn’t exactly make you more money, it does stop you losing money through lost sales. Unfortunately losing money through a poor checkout experience is not unusual. Simple ailments such as surprise postage costs will be enough for people to bail at checkout. We’d recommend videoing your users to ascertain where they bail as a good start to reducing your CAR. You will also learn from the shortcuts and stumbling blocks they encounter.
In a business-to-business scenario where there is no cart, we would look at people bailing on your; ‘quote request form’, ‘contact form’ or any other data capture element to your website. You may have multiple data capture points where you could be losing leads and genuine business opportunities.
KPI summary
There are many indicators, but Key Performance Indicators are what affect your bottom line.
For example; If you have a low Engagement Rate (or high Bounce Rate as it used to be known) it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the user is on your Contact Us page, it shows they found exactly what they needed, your contact information. However, if it’s a product page, then you need to dig deeper to find out why they’re not engaging and leaving the page, as that suggests you’re losing sales. It’s important information but not considered a Key Performance Indicator.
We can help you strategise, set your KPIs and understand how you should be monitoring what success look like. As you may have noticed, this is ‘our thing’.
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