Measurable Goals: Key Performance Indicators For Your Web Site

There’s a lot more to successful internet marketing than a sale, or a lead.

Your ‘key performance indicators’ (KPIs, for short) measure your site’s contribution to success in other channels. And they measure your site’s drip-drip-drip effect as it grows your organization.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what ‘success’ is. And you can’t figure out something like what a click’s worth until you do.

Here’s how you can find your web site KPIs:

1. What’s your business? If services, skip to #4. If product, go to #2.
2. If you offer a catalog, then a catalog request is a goal. If you don’t already have it, create a catalog order form.
3. If you offer demonstrations, then a demo request is a goal. If you don’t have one, create a form for visitors that lets them request a demonstration.
4. Getting someone to contact you is a goal, too. Create that form, too.
5. So is an e-mail newsletter signup.
6. And a white paper, case study or article download.
7. Is there one page on your site that’s critical to your message? Reading that page is a goal, too.
8. How much time, on average, do visitors spend on your site? Any visitor spending more than that should be considered a success/goal, too.

Creating those forms is easy. Use Survey Monkey, or Salesforce, or Zoho.com.

Enter each of these KPIs into a spreadsheet. Or just write them on your whiteboard.

Set up Google Analytics or another analytics package to track all of these KPIs.

Then watch. Which KPIs seem to reflect real gains? The only way to know is to test. Over time, you can narrow your list and more accurately measure success.

Technorati Tags: key performance indicators, KPI, web analytics