This is my first attempt at sharing some of my work and some of the lessons that I’ve learnt over the past 8 years as a digital analyst. I hopefully it will be of some benefit to you.

I hope to write a number of articles about digital measurement and implementing custom tracking. However, I believe it is only prudent to start at the beginning. And in my opinion, the beginning is not as much a question of how, as it is of what. It also happens to be an area where I’ve seen so many companies and people go wrong.

Digital Objectives

Most businesses have a good understanding of their objectives (normally sales), unfortunately digital objectives are often a different story.

I’ve seen far too many businesses that haven’t defined their digital objectives. Or business that have tried to copy paste their overall business objectives as digital objectives. Here are a couple of tips to help you define useful digital specific objectives.

Start off with asking a single question: Why do you have a digital presence?

This might sound simple, but too often the honest answer to this question is “because everyone else does”. If this is the case, rephrase it as: How do you expect (hope for) your digital presence to impact your business?

In case you’re still struggling to define digital objectives, read this great piece by Avinash. If you’re not familiar with Avinash’s work, do yourself a favour and bookmark his blog.

The next step is where you (the person reading this blog) needs to take care. Namely, defining goals on the back of these objectives.

Digital Goals

I was introduced to SMART goals by a colleague of mine. Since then, I found far too many different variations of this acronym. So I’m going to abandon this and focus on the single most important point for digital goals.

Goals need to be measurable!!!

Let me start by saying, it is your responsibility to ensure that all digital goals can be linked to data. When someone says their goal is to create “brand love”, it is up to you to ask them how exactly they propose to measure that.

Only once you know what measures are important to the business, can you figure out what needs to be measured. As simple and logical as this sounds, it is amazing how often this is not properly comprehended.

The exact metrics that are associated with each goal are often referred to as KPIs.

KPIs

Just because the hard work of defining objectives and goals is done, doesn’t mean you can now get lazy with choosing your KPIs. I’ve seen situations where days are spent defining and refining goals until appropriate, measurable, digital specific goals are chosen – only for some “head of” to insist on irrelevant KPIs.

These irrelevant KPIs are normally as the result of one thing – vanity metrics.

Too often, people are looking for KPIs that will impress their boss, rather than KPIs that are useful and lead to action. This normally means choosing metrics that boast the highest values – for example, page views rather than goal completions.

To avoid falling into this trap, make sure that your KPIs cover the following three criteria:

You’ve done all of the work in defining goals, don’t choose a KPI that is only loosely related to your goal. Make sure it is the best possible measure of whether the defined goal.

Something that you can impact:

Choosing KPIs that you do not have the power to impact is going to mean that your performance is left purely up to chance. This also leads on to the next point, which is:

Something that will drive action:

If you see a downward trend in your KPI, you should immediately jump to action and try figure out what has gone wrong. Choosing KPIs where you simply shrug and lay the blame on on some other factor means that you have probably chosen the wrong KPI.

Once you have gone through the process of figuring out what it is that you are trying to impact, you can start the process of analysing, testing and measuring – i.e. the fun stuff.

If you have any questions about what would make good objectives, goals and KPIs, or if you need some help in defining these for your company, just drop me a message.