Actionable metrics

Understanding online behaviour is key to customer engagement. Richard Sedley, director of cScape’s Customer Engagement Unit, explains how actionable metrics can help you make effective changes to your web strategy and increase returns on your objectives.

A starting point for any online customer engagement strategy is gathering data. It is crucial to find out what your customers do when they visit your site – and not base it on guesswork. So how do you know what to look for? The first step, before measurement and analysis, is to identify which data you can act on in a way that will actually benefit your customers and yourself.

Many businesses suffer from ‘metric paralysis’; they collect too much data which they just don’t have the time or know-how to learn from. While this mass of data can look impressive, it is hardly ever used effectively to improve the customer’s online experience, or overall business performance.

Metrics should be actionable. They should give you specific insights into your visitors’ behaviour so that you can take appropriate action based on that information. But even metrics that are actionable don't do anything in and of themselves to improve a site. They simply bring out positive and negative indicators. To change things for the better requires an organisational structure whereby appropriate measures can be taken.

Target your data

First, it’s crucial to make sure people in your organisation pay attention to the data. They need to know how to get hold of it, but you can also set up regular meetings or send emails, discussing the up-to-date data and what to do about them. Also, make sure the right information gets to the right person – the marketing executive will not be interested in the same metrics as the technical consultant. This might seem obvious, but in my experience few companies actually differentiate between audiences when circulating their website stats.

Second, people need to be encouraged to take action. You can achieve this by presenting technical data in an accessible way using key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, use percentages instead of raw numbers to present web trends, use different colours in your report to indicate positive and negative changes and use symbols, such as arrows, to indicate increases and decreases in page views or site visits. These indicators are more readable than tables and are more likely to motivate your busy colleagues to take action. For example, it is not always a good thing for a web page to increase in popularity, in which case a red up-arrow is a very clear indicator that someone needs to pay attention to the trend.

Most of the common questions businesses have about their web activity can only be answered through understanding customer behaviour, which is why monitoring site activity is so important. But what information can guide you to make appropriate changes?

Focus your attention

General web analytics might help identify or confirm problems and needs:

• Why are my customers not completing a sale?
• How can I encourage visitors to view, or not view, certain pages?
• Why don’t visitors sign up to our newsletter and other services?
• What stops visitors from downloading information?

But how can you actually make positive changes? The trick is to focus your attention on a single problem at any one time, while putting that particular problem in the context of your entire website. In many cases small changes can elicit big results.

A recent experience I had consulting for an online publication on their web strategy really brought to light how simple insights from actionable metrics can make all the difference. The client wanted to know what was stopping their visitors from signing up to newsletters and booking tickets for events. Looking at the metrics it became clear that visitors were bypassing most of the site’s calls-to-action, which were on the homepage. In fact, only 18 per cent of site users were ever seeing the newsletter sign up facility. A simple change ensuring that this sign up box now appeared on the ‘run of site’ meant that my client was able to increase potential sign ups by 450 per cent.

Adapt your strategy

Successful metrics analysis will help you identify areas of your site that need to be enhanced, sections that need to be made more accessible and how web strategies such as online promotions can be improved.

Web analytics should tell you more than just interesting facts – when they are actionable, they can have a major impact on the success of your web strategy and will help to align your organisation’s objectives with your customers’ needs in order to prompt an action that is beneficial to both parties. That way you can adapt your web strategy to achieve your business goals. By using the gathered data to offer your customers what they want and encourage them to find out more, you can be more certain of their continued productive use of your site.