How to work in a more data-driven way
By Frida Rydén
Do you feel compelled to work in a more data-driven way? If you are in charge of digital strategy, you might have a magnificent plan, but let's face it: sometimes, explaining your vision can become a bit abstract. To make it more structured, here's a guide on how to find your essential KPI's and develop a measurement plan to help you set goals for your digital strategy.
"In order to decide what data to collect in Google Analytics you will need a clear measurement strategy for your business. You do this by defining your business goals and how you expect to measure these results".
That’s how Google's Justin Cutroni easily summarises how to compile a measurement strategy – sounds easy enough, but it would be helpful to have a roadmap to actually develop this strategy.
Develop a measurement plan in 3 steps
It's necessary to have a solid foundation when you start to work on measuring and monitoring your performance and activity across digital channels. Start out with these three steps to help you plan ahead:
Step 1
What is your organisation's business idea?
The first step is to find the answer to this question: what is the purpose of our presence on different digital channels? First, you need to find out what's most important for your business to succeed, and then explore what metrics are relevant for this to happen. A solid piece of advice is to take a look at your company's business idea or business description.
Step 2
Find business-driven data in your digital channels
For a company selling products, the answer to the question above is easy: our company is on the web because we want to sell more products! However, public sector businesses and B2B companies might need to find KPIs other than sales figures if they want their efforts and optimisation to lead to increased conversions. Are there particular pages that you want your hypothetical clients to visit, any form you want them to fill in, do you want them to sign up for your newsletter? These are micro conversions on your site that might lead to a macro conversion – finding new leads and increasing the client base.
Step 3
Choose the most important KPIs, decide how to keep track of them - weekly or monthly, in a report or on a dashboard?
Is it important for you to know how many visitors your site has? Certainly, it might be interesting to keep track of, but it’s more important to find business-driving data that can answer the question of what to do to achieve your goals. Regarding an organization's website, you can find possible KPIs by asking:
- What is our goal with the website/campaign/market activity?
- How do we measure if we have achieved our goal?
- What is the most important Key Performance Indicator, the one that signifies success?
For a B2B company, it’s important to not only look at increased traffic; above all, you should be asking yourself: do we have profitable traffic? Improvements and marketing obviously aim at getting more visitors who carry out successful visits. It's only when you have defined what a successful visit really is, and what activities you’re working on, that you can see if your efforts produce results. That opens up the possibility of actually pinpointing changes that need to be made and providing data to back up your hypothesis.
Measurement with Google Analytics and other tools
When you know which questions you want to answer, you can specify what data is needed, and design measurement and follow-up actions that suit your needs.
It's very possible that you already have Google Analytics installed to measure statistics on your site; after all, it's a free tool that's well established. It also works well with other Google products, such as Google Ads (formerly AdWords). You can also use measuring tools such as Hotjar to get insight into how your visitors are moving on your side - do they find the important information that actually makes them act? Is your start page designed in an intuitive and user-friendly way?
The tide is high to put the right tools to work!
We can help you with your measurement plan
Your measurement plan will help you structure what your business goals are and how to measure them. Once you know why you are on the web and have set up a measurement plan, how do you proceed?
Get a web analyst to help you get insight into what can and cannot be measured based on your goals!
You've probably also discovered that it's time consuming to determine if the data that goes into Google Analytics is accurate. An analyst can help you with configuring Google Analytics and tagging campaigns in order to get reliable data.
You might also need help with visualising the KPI’s you want to follow, as well as a way to do it in a user-friendly manner. Google Data Studio is a useful tool for building appealing and useful dashboards and reports – and this is something we're more than happy to help you with at Comprend!
