What Gets Measured… Gets Done?

There is a famous saying, “What gets measured gets managed”, or “What gets measured, gets done”. It's often attributed to Peter Drucker (but his organizations said it was not him initially).

Other sources say it was coined by William Thomson, the Scottish physicist also known as Lord Kelvin. That dude learned how to measure (electrical units).

But when it comes to measurement… what happens when you are measuring the wrong things? Does that lead to doing the wrong things and inaccurate data?

What Are YOU Measuring?

Regarding data from websites, businesses (and some gurus) tend to focus on traffic as the primary measurement of success. If you buy ads or do better at SEO, you will see your website traffic increase.

Although a rise in stats is exciting, what if I told you that you may be measuring the wrong ones?

Traffic equals visitors or hits. If you dig a bit deeper, you will see that the vast majority of that traffic spends 1-10 seconds on your website. A human can do little in that time. But a bot or web crawler can determine if your URL is working and legit and if certain keywords are present.

As awesome as that is, what percentage of your annual sales can be attributed to bots and web crawlers? I would imagine that would be between .0001% and .03% (in other words literally nothing).

What SHOULD Get Measured?

Humans will tend to engage anywhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes on your website. What you want to measure is that engagement.

For example, a client of ours has monthly web traffic of 7000 hits (sessions or visits) to their website per month. 95% of those are 0-10 seconds. Less than .5% are from 10-30 seconds and around 1% are from 30 seconds to 10 minutes or more. Which portion of those 7000 visitors do you think are most likely to start a conversation and make a purchase?

It makes sense to focus on what content those visitors are looking at and try to get them to engage more.

Why Get Engagers to Engage More?

What you want to measure first is what are the engagers engaging with. That can be found by looking at what pages are getting around 1-3 minutes of time on that page. Keep in mind that bots can drop that to below 1 minute if they are the majority of the hits, so don't immediately throw out data as says 1 minute or less.

Obviously, you would like to know WHO those visitors are, but technology and privacy laws limit your ability to collect THAT data. You can however still collect information that can lead you to the promised land… knowing who is engaging and having a real-life conversation with them.

When you know what pages real people are visiting, it just makes sense to entice them to keep engaging. But how?

How To Get Engagers to Engage More

One way is to ask questions. If you add a call to action (think, banner ad) that says “Got Questions? Click Here!” you can be sure that at least some of the page visitors will take you up on that.

This can take them to a “Contact Us” form to fill out with their question and basic contact info. This can be effective, but many people equate giving contact info to being added to an email list, so those who don't have an immediate need may hesitate.

Another way is to predictively answer questions. We do this with a Decision Tree. This (like the banner ad) gets people to click through. The difference, is they are not forced to give info to get answers.

The first page confirms that we understand your issue and you are in the right place. When they click “Next”, they are given 2-3 options to narrow down their issue and outcomes. Finally, then it takes them to a page that offers Good-Better-Best options (the power of three), and lets them download a .pdf slick with those options, and no contact info is required.

Also on that page, you can offer links to resources. This could be videos, webinars, eBooks, links to more detailed pages, and an opportunity to connect with a member of your sales team. Some of those options may require contact info to complete, but at that point, they probably have engaged enough to improve the chance that they WILL want to engage more.

This is also a GREAT WAY to drive additional and measurable traffic to pages and resources associated with Market Development Funds.

Tracking Engagement

The Decision Tree also allows us to tag the person interacting. If they choose to give information to any form on the website, we can track when and which Decision Tree they engaged with even if it's days or weeks before they provide contact details.

This provides key insight into their website visits and activity which can be analyzed and utilized by management and/or salespeople.

This is not like one of those cookies that tracks you across the internet and other websites. It is limited to activity on your website only.

Final Thoughts

Keep in mind, this is not designed to trick visitors into disclosing information, it's about TRUST.

It often takes time and multiple interactions to get people to trust you and your business enough to want to engage and continue to engage.

The secret sauce is knowing what questions your audience wants to have answered and providing them with quality options to explore, even if it does not lead to an immediate or even a future sale.