If you sell stuff direct through your website there’s an obvious metric that you and your boss will be obsessed about: revenue. Having revenue as your metric gives you a big, single focus when it comes to improving your site. There are all sorts of things you can do: you can optimises your checkout process to make it as quick and easy as possible; you can test various product combinations and hope to increase the size of the shopping basket; you can improve the descriptions of your products. The list is endless and there are loads of helpful articles all over the web to guide you on what to do.

Most of our clients are marketers working in consumer healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical device companies. They don’t sell products online. They want their customers to come to the site, learn about the product and then go and buy it in a shop, ask their doctor for a prescription or perhaps place an order via a sales rep. The point at which money actually changes hands is far removed from the website visit. As a result we often find that these marketers focus on metrics like unique visitors and pageviews – metrics that tend to make senior managers’ eyes glaze over. This is bad news if you want to persuade your boss to give you more budget to invest in online.

At Content Formula, we try to help our clients identify metrics that are more closely linked to the end sale because it’s these kinds of metrics that senior management really want to see. Finding the right metrics means identifying specific website goals that can be measured by tools like Google Analytics. It’s not always an easy thing to do but if you ask yourself the question “what do I want users to do when they come to my site” you can start to come up with some good ideas. It’s also important to limit the number of goals you have on your site. One goal is ideal, two or three is ok but any more than that and it is starting to look like you are not focused on your business objectives.

Here’s an example for you. Imagine you are a product manager trying to market a stapling tool to surgeons. You’ve developed a cool interactive demo video which you know surgeons find very persuasive. You set up two goals on your website. The first one is a video view – i.e. each time a visitor views the video to the end, that counts as one goal converted. The second goal is a “get a rep to contact me” form. You place the form right next to the video but the goal is only counted once the visitor has hit the submit button on the form. In effect, you’ve created a two-step sales funnel. Once these goals are set up you could start measuring yourself and then perform simple tweaks to improve goal conversions. By using A/B testing techniques you can easily test different tweaks against one another. We think that’s pretty cool but you can you see that your boss will be super pleased when you go to him and tell him that not only have you generated X sales enquiries but you know that for every 20 visitors that come to your site, one submits an enquiry. In fact, tell him that and he’s likely to give you more budget to spend on search advertising to drive more traffic to your site.

Hopefully you can see how forward-thinking marketers are adopting the same metrics mindset as online retailers and applying it to their digital activities. They are finding ways to demonstrate to senior management the effects their digital activity has on driving down brand spend and driving up revenue. This approach to digital analytics encourages continuous and incremental improvement and enhancement of ROI rather than big-bang site launches where ROI begins to fall from day 1.

At Content Formula we provide special website support packages aimed at helping clients optimise their sites through incremental improvements. If you’re interested, please get in touch with Dan Hawtrey