Understanding Business Objectives
What are your business objectives?
According to Avinash Kaushik*, they should be:
Doable
Understandable
Manageable
Beneficial
When fleshing out your business objectives, they must be rational. Expecting to realize a 20% increase in revenue in the first month is not only “dumb” in the truest sense of the word, but is completely unrealistic. By using the “DUMB” construct, you can devise objectives that are within reason, and are specific toward reaching your overall brand strategy. Goals must be centered on creating awareness, cultivating interest, generating desire, and stimulating action.
Business Specific Goals
Depending on the type of business you have, these steps will all be different. Make sure they are specific to your business. This requires identifying the key performance indicators (KPI) that track progress in the realization of your business objectives.
These KPI’s Must Also Be Realistic.
Awareness Phase:
Create an analytics report that measures Visits/Unique Visits
Interest Phase:
Create a report that measures page views, number of pages viewed, and time spent on site.
Desire Phase:
Create a report that measures specific item landing page visits, and if you have one, a membership enrollment page, and a wish list creation
Action Phase:
Create a report on shopping cart fulfillment and conversions would be appropriate.
Satisfaction Phase:
Results in a completed Conversion report, and a positive comment on the feedback page.
Why Analytics Are Important
These analytical reports are positive aspects of solid business goals. They would be useless without setting realistic targets to measure progress, or indicate problems to be addressed. Analytics reveal the good and the bad. Capitalizing on the good, and rectifying the bad are all part of setting business goals.
When creating a strategic marketing plan, creating analytics reports to monitor all facets of that plan is a good business practice. The ability to adjust keyword strategy, content composition and keyword placement, replace poor performing landing pages, correcting and eliminating broken internal links, and ultimately, increasing conversion rates are all segments that are correctable, and being aware of their existence is a direct result of monitoring analytics reports.
* Digital Marketing and Measurement Model: Web Analytics. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/?utm_source=analytics academy&utm_medium=text lesson&utm_campaign=lesson 2.4