Digital Analytics Success Requires Crystal Clear Business Goals

Is your organisation struggling to see the value of digital analytics? Feel like there are a ton of numbers but no tie to business success? Before you throw out your vendors, your existing reports, or your analysts, stop and ask your leaders the following question:

“What makes our digital customer interactions successful?”

For example:

• What outcomes make a visit to our website “successful”? Or in other words: What do we want visitors to do?
• What interactions make a download of our app “successful”? How would we like users to engage with it? Do we want them to use it every day? Or do we want long periods of engagement, even if they are less frequently? Is there particular content we want them to use within the app?
• What objectives are we accomplishing with our Facebook page or Twitter account that make them “successful”? Why are we even engaging with customers on social media, and what do we want to get out of it?

That’s not to say there is only one behaviour that defines a success. In fact, there are many, and businesses that interact with all kinds of customers create the need for different measure of success.

In a B2B environment, a “successful visit” for a new customer might be one in which they submitted a contact request. For an existing customer, a “successful visit” might be one in which they found the answer to an issue in your support section. For a content site, a visit might be successful if they read or share a certain number of articles. A CPG business may want visitors to research and compare their products. A successful visit to a restaurant’s website might be one in which a visitor searches for a location.

So if your business is not yet measuring successful customer interactions, how can you start? First, gather your major stakeholders. In a working session, ask for their input on:

• Why does your website / mobile experience / social media presence / etc even exist?
• If we took down the website / our mobile app / stopped engaging in social tomorrow, what would we be losing? What could customers not do, that they can do today?
• If a visitor came in and performed only one behaviour on the site, what would you want it to be?
• If visitors suddenly stopped doing one thing on the site that spelled disaster, what would that be?

What you’re ultimately looking for is, “Why are we doing this, and what will make our business stakeholders happy?” Approaching it from this standpoint, rather than “What goals should we configure in Google Analytics?” allows for critical business input, without getting buried in the technical details of creating goals or setting success events. Once you have this, you have clear objectives for digital analytics to measure against.