The Benefits Of A KPI Dashboard
One of the components of web analytics is ensuring that your web analytics tool is properly setup. Measurement and analysis of accurate data enables you to make effective strategic decisions.
Once you have a web analytics tool setup, you will need an effective dashboard.
Included below are a few notes on dashboards.
Measuring and Reporting:
Defining the KPIs that point towards your business and website goals is extremely important and, by creating a dashboard that contains marketing channel and Site Optimisation KPIs, it will clearly show you how performance is trending. This is something you need to watch closely.
Your KPIs will be dependent on your business objectives and thus will be different from business to business. The key is to ensure that they point towards your business goals and enable you to take action to improve performance.
Some example KPIs might include:
Visitor Conversion Rate
Paid Search Conversion Rate
Checkout Completion Rate
Other KPIs may include “Percentage of High Recency visitors”, where recency is defined as visitors that visited your site within the last 5 days, in this case: the higher the percentage the better. In other cases, like “Home Page Bounce Rate” the key is to keep the percentage as low as possible.
Standardised Reporting – Once you have an effective Dashboard, you are able to view all your critical KPIs at a glance. Perhaps you require a weekly dashboard, a monthly dashboard, or both.
Make faster and smarter decisions – An effective Dashboard will enable you to make quicker decisions. You will clearly know whether the critical few KPIs are trending up or down. If there’s a large performance change for the reporting period, you should investigate why the metric is yielding the performance, and in turn it should give you great insight.
Communication and Accountability – With standardised reporting on one dashboard, internal teams and agencies will be more accountable on measured performance. This will have a direct impact on your bottom line. Setting realistic goals and milestones becomes easier too.
Greater Profits – Once you start entrenching a sound web analytics strategy, you will improve your decision making, which should ultimately have a positive effect on your bottom line. Ensuring you have an effective dashboard to measure the critical KPIs is just the beginning.
