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3.9: Measuring success

  • Page ID
    36848
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    Success should primarily be measured against your objectives. Gathering an idea of the total economic value of your online efforts can be difficult, but you can do it by examining the following, among others:

    Site measures

    • Audience behaviour statistics (measuring new against returning customers)
    • Audience (unique users, page impressions, bounce rates, and visit duration)
    • Frequency and engagement
    • Conversions across all channels.

    Sales

    • Net sales
    • Average order value
    • Gross or median order value
    • Customer acquisition rate
    • Customer retention rate (remember, a retained customer is worth three to five times more than a once-off customer, and it is cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones)
    • Offline sales as a result of online drivers (if someone visits the website or sees an ad online and then walks into the physical store, think about how you can measure this).

    Services

    • Retention
    • Acquisitions.

    Technical performance

    Measuring your technical performance is important to ensure that your customer has a good experience on your online properties and will return. You should always have goals for how you want the user to experience the website, considering elements such as:

    • Site maintenance, speed and performance
      • Time per page load (average should be 3 seconds)
    • Capacity and reach
    • IT services support
    • SEO.

    Remember, your user will give you three to four seconds of engagement time on a landing page and seven seconds on a homepage before they leave if you haven’t answered their question, so make sure you know what the user wants and how to give it to them.

    Operations

    • Order processing time (an improvement on this based on digital technology is a contribution of online to the business, and it should be counted as a success)
    • Fulfilment rates
    • Substitution (if a product isn’t available, how successful are you at substituting a different one?).

    Marketing

    • Campaign results against set objectives
    • Customer loyalty NPS.
    • Channel optimisation
    • Customer surveys.

    The idea of benchmarking can cause some confusion for brands wanting to measure their success. While industry benchmarks for things like marketing campaigns can be useful for seeing your standing in your industry, you should really be benchmarking against your own previous performance to ensure that you are always improving as a brand.

    On the other hand, harder, more technical aspects of your digital performance should absolutely be measured against universal standards. Page load times have a measurable effect on SEO and customer engagement, so although decreasing your time from twelve to eight seconds is a good effort, you would still be well above the expected three seconds, and this will impact your site’s overall performance in multiple areas (Hobo, 2017).

    Note

    Uncertain how to measure customer loyalty? Take a look at this article on the net promoter score (NPS), which is the KPI used to measure this: blog. emolytics.com/kpi/ net-promoter-scorecustomer-loyalty.

    clipboard_e1d6e0aa7a1f3461ae1707dc25baf7dca.png
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Longer load times increase page abandonment Adapted from Hobo, 2017.

    The time you take to respond to consumers or to make a sale should be measured against universal benchmarks for similar reasons. That is, consumers have come to expect a certain standard in some areas, and anything not meeting this standard will result in a negative customer experience.

    Each chapter in this book will give you an indication of the kind of metrics you should look at to determine success in particular areas.


    This page titled 3.9: Measuring success is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Rob Stokes via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.