I’m re-tooling my scorecard to better monitor both week-over-week and month-over-month. I’ve been using a scorecard for the past 10 months since moving to HBX. The current scorecard was working fine but it was time for some tweaks given our new strategy rollout.
Recently we made some site changes to IA, modified our “pillar” pages (banking, loans and credit, investments and insurance) to see if we could get visitor to get into the depths of the site more efficiently and introduced a new tabbed page model to make it easier to browse and sort complex product categories. All of these changes were driven entirely by analysis of our web metrics rather than sheer intuition and have been measured since launch to monitor effectiveness. At a aggregate level I can tell you the changes have been well received.
What I have started is creating separate scorecards to monitor specific site changes. This makes it easier to share externally with our design agency, team, etc. so they can see the effects of certain design changes. What’s great about this is that it allows you to specifically track your changes and introduce other KPIs that you may not be monitoring normally in your main KPI scorecard.
One of my favorite KPIs is stickiness. As Eric Peterson points out in The Big Book of KPIs, stickiness is “one of the most important marketing KPIs” and is a great indicator of the liklihood that your pages will keep people on the site. One of the things I like about this KPI is that it is made from easily accessible data, even easier to explain when you show the results to someone and simple to monitor over any period of time.
For those not aware of this KPI, the stickiness of a page is measured as:
1.00 – (single access page views of the page / entry page views of the same page)
If you can’t grab page views, visits will do as long as you maintain a one-to-one relationship and use visits throughout (thanks to Eric for confirming this on his web analytics group on Yahoo!).
The closer to one, the stickier the page is. You can also treat the ratio as a percentage — the percentage that the user will at least see one more page. Layer on top some segmentation and you can look at the conversion rate for particular segments traversing each page, referrers and their affect on stickiness (which could also point to traffic quality).
Using WebSideStory’s HBX Excel plug-in, Report Builder, you can quickly and easily build out a report and gather the necessary data without having to spend time in various interfaces grabbing numbers.
I’d be interested in hearing how you measure and monitor your site success/failure and leverage for optimization.