Defining Business KPIs for your Website

KPI or Key Performance Indicators are measurements of business goals and objectives and may be unique for your business. Each business requires a different set of reports in terms of specific metrics.

There are different models you can use to define your KPIs. Government usually focuses on measuring the whole organisation's efforts, while as the business sector focuses on revenue.

Depending on who reads these reports in your business, you'll likely have different expectations of what KPIs matter. For example, those responsible for the content on the website and those planning the budget will have very different KPI needs.

Think for a moment about benchmarking the performance; do you compare benchmarking against the previous date range (month/quarter/year) or against average industry benchmarks? Either way the focus will be on improving each metric in the KPI.

We can group KPIs by action, for example:

Awareness - how many individuals responded to a campaign? Acquisition - how many visitors engaged with the campaign's objective? Engagement - how many visitors started the conversion process? Conversion - how many visitors finished the conversion funnel? Loyalty - how many visitors return and continue the engage?

For eCommerce websites, the focus should be on converting site visitors into repeat customers. For this reason, KPIs such as conversion rate, new versus returning customers, visit value, ecetera are important for eCommerce sites.

For content sites, where revenue comes from advertising, KPIs should be more oriented around the visitors' content and site experience. KPIs for this type of website would be visits / unique visitors, pages per visit, new versus returning visitors. More pages per visit demonstrates more interest in the content.

Lead generation sites focus on KPIs such as cost per lead (CPL), which is important for defining campaign budgets, conversion rate, and new versus returning visitors.

General KPI metrics can be:

• Traffic sources
• Time on site
• Bounce rate per keyword
• Traffic of branded and non-branded keywords
• Social media interactions
• Traffic distributed by country / cities

In conclusion, consider your business model in combination with the purpose of your website to determine relevant KPIs that can measure the online progress of your website's goals.