Back in November, I first wrote about benchmarking, considering who you should be benchmarking your site against. Now I want to talk a little about what metrics you should be benchmarking over time and against the competition.

When thinking about the metrics you want to use to benchmark the experience on your site, there are a few key issues to keep in mind: how do you define success on your site? How can you measure the impact of changes to your site on the customer experience? How does the site experience influence other aspects of your business? There are some benchmarking methods which look at a single metric, such as NetPromoter which looks only at likelihood to recommend. While these numbers can be useful, we feel it is important to understand how your Website impacts a wider range of metrics in order to understand how changes to your site, your industry and the internet impact both the customer experience on your site and the ramifications that experience has for your business. To that end, there are a few areas we suggest you look at to come up with the metrics you will benchmark throughout time and against the competition:

1. Clearly define success metrics for your site. One of the questions we ask clients in each project kick-off meeting is how they define success for their Website. To us, it seems like a very basic question that will allow us to understand how we can help a client drive toward greater success. What seems like a simple question often draws a blank from our clients, so this is the first place that you should begin within any benchmarking project, defining success for your site. This can be very different depending on your industry or even the specific area of your Website you are focusing on. For a consumer products company, your Website may be successful if it increases brand awareness and positive feelings towards your brand, while for an e-commerce site, sales, conversion and a sales per cart may define success. So step 1 is to define these metrics and determine how you are going to measure them (questions to ask, scales to use, etc.)

2. Measure the customer experience on your Website. Typical customer experience metrics to track include success (the ability to complete the task the user came to the site to complete), overall satisfaction with site experience and likelihood to return to and recommend the site. The benefit of these customer experience metrics is that not only do they give you a picture of what is happening on your site, but you can also measure them on your competitors’ site(s) through a head-to-head evaluation. While you may not be able to determine how your competitors rank on the success metrics you have defined, customer experience metrics are measurable and can help you identify key areas in which the competition is outpacing you as well as areas in which you are excelling. These metrics also allow you to measure the impact of changes to your site quickly in ways that may not have bubbled up to the level of your success metrics yet.

3. Impact across the business. Finally, you want to make sure you are not only thinking about the Web experience, but how that experience may drive offline actions, such as visiting a brick and mortar outlet, or impact your brand, as could be seen in the increase in positive feelings toward your company. With these metrics it is likely you may measure them in brand tracking studies or other surveys that measure offline activities. The key here is to make sure you include them in your online benchmarking, asked in the same way, not only to measure the impact the Web is having on them, but also to be able to compare across the customer data you are collecting from a variety of sources.

Once you have defined these metrics, define the scale and the way the questions getting at this data will be asked and be consistent. By collecting this data in a consistent manner across your research, you will quickly build up a set of benchmarking criteria to help inform decisions as you move forward.

Stay tuned for the next post: Part 3 – how often should you be benchmarking?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Benchmarking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.