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Goal Setup & Configuration

Understanding who your visitors are and where they are coming from is important. Knowing how your site is being used can help you make informed decisions on how to improve your website. Website goals are specific indicators that are measured.

What’s a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Key performance indicators are pre-determined metrics to measure success. For example, many clients choose to measure the number of visitors that complete contact forms, pick up the phone and call, or make contact with the business. This number is a value that allows a business to determine how well their website is attracting prospects.

There are many other types of KPIs that are valuable to businesses:

  • % of visitors that buy from an online shopping cart.
  • % of visitors that complete an online registration form.
  • The number of visitors that sign up for email newsletters.

In most cases, KPIs measure actionable sequences that can be made by the visitor. However sometimes, KPIs can measure other types of events:

  • Number of visitors that land on a web page, driven by Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
  • % of visitors that leave your website from a specific page.
  • The time the visitor spends on your website.
  • The number of pages visited.

What is important about KPIs is not the number, but what they mean. For example, the number of pages that a visitor views on your website can be an indication of how engaged the user is with your website. KPIs can usually be interpreted in different ways.

Let’s look at an example:

Your visitors on average spend 5 minutes on your website, and look at 18 pages. This could be an indication that your visitor is very engaged and interested in your content. But another way to look at this would be that the visitor is having a difficult time finding the information they are looking for. What is key is knowing the goals – a website that supports users and gives answers would typically want short visits as this indicates that visitors are finding what they are looking for quickly. An online magazine however would want visitors to spend more time on the site, as this is an indication that visitors like the content. This can translate into more revenue from advertising.

It’s not always easy to determine what the KPIs mean, so hiring a professional to help you interpret them is a sound decision. We specialize in helping clients not only establish goals and KPIs but understand what they mean.