The ability to leverage advanced marketing analytics to measure performance continues to increase yearly. This is so much the truth that the real question isn’t whether you can measure an interaction, but rather whether you should measure that interaction.

A recent search on G2 Crowd for marketing analytics software surfaced over 200 platforms they felt were worthy of including in their “best of” lists. As tools proliferate, the temptation to measure everything grows exponentially.

But should you? Are more metrics going to make a difference? Or are marketers better off with less but more impactful measurables?

WHEN MORE ISN’T MORE

Early in my career, I worked with a leadership team that went all in on the KPI train. The team had to compile, analyze, and report over 50 indicators every month. It is safe to say that “key” was hardly an appropriate descriptor for many of the metrics that were tracked, analyzed, and reported. Yet new measures were added regularly, with, seemingly, none of the old ones ever coming off.

The result was hours and hours spent on reporting what happened and never enough time spent analyzing why it happened and what we could do to make it happen again.

Of course, the opposite challenge of over-analysis is marketing teams that operate with no objective measures or, worse, only track vanity metrics. This approach too often incentivizes counterproductive activities for a marketing team and low performance for the brand.

AN OBJECTIVELY BETTER APPROACH

In his book Measure What Matters, John Doerr preached a more disciplined, outcome-oriented approach to how brands should measure their performance. The concept was relatively simple. Doerr wrote about the importance of using OKRs, “objectives and key results,” to measure performance. These OKRs are similar to a traditional KPI but emphasize the objective you are trying to drive and the measure you will use to track progress toward your goal.

While many of the examples that Doerr used in his book were centered around mega-brands like Google, Intel, and Adobe, any brand can apply these same principles to develop an impactful marketing objective.

A few marketing objective examples you might consider for your brand.

AWARENESS AND CONSIDERATION

Traditional brand awareness studies are time-consuming and can sometimes rely on small sample sizes. Instead, one approach is to leverage proxy measures to track the overall impact.

Objective: Increase brand awareness and consideration
Key Result: Grow monthly branded search online by 20% over the next 12 months

EVALUATION AND INTENT

For many brands, the purchase cycle can be a more considered process. Using “speed to purchase” ecommerce metrics for these brands can lead to marketers missing key signals from buyers.

Objective: Improve evaluation and purchase intent among prospective buyers
Key Result: Raise the number of returning site visits along with the number of page views of product and pricing pages by 15%

LOYALTY AND RETENTION

Brands often wait too long to find out if they have loyalty and retention issues. Monitoring customer engagement from the beginning can help head off cancellations at renewal time.

Objective: Reduce first-year customer churn
Key Result: Increase the frequency of customer logins by 30%

While these are only a few examples, the idea is first to identify the overarching objective and then construct a measurement plan to objectively understand whether your marketing activities are driving the results you need.

GETTING STARTED ON YOUR ANALYTIC JOURNEY

Always start with the big picture: your primary objective. What is it? Imagine sitting around a table with your team 12 months from now. Everyone is high-fiving each other because of the fantastic success you’ve seen.

What happened that made everyone excited? That big audacious goal might be your objective.

And from there, think through three to five measurable actions you can track toward achieving your goal. If a data point doesn’t fall into one of these actions, it may not be significant enough to monitor.

Now you’re ready to launch with the focus you need to succeed.

For many, understanding user behavior and overall customer engagement on a website might encompass assessing metrics like sessions and conversion rate. Maybe marketing professionals are also looking at the time on site or bounce rates. However, the challenge is that too many digital marketers stop there.

While each of these measures are important, they represent only a beginning in the journey to understanding the overall customer engagement your website is generating. The wealth of behavioral data that can be garnered about your site visitors is almost unending if you take the time to look deeper.

WHY SOME USER BEHAVIOR IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS

Your website contains a wealth of information for your visitors. It helps them learn more about your brand and the challenges you can help them solve. Ultimately the success of your site may be measured by its ability to deliver a conversion. However, without understanding what actions or paths a visitor takes before they convert, it can be a guess as to which paths lead to successful conversions and which lead to visitors bouncing out of your website.

Therefore, it is vital to understand your website visitors’ non-conversion behavioral data.

USING AN ENGAGEMENT FRAMEWORK TO ASSESS NON-CONVERSION  BEHAVIORS

When working with clients, I like to work from an adaptable framework to understand visitors’ journey to their website. This framework will change based on the user’s goals and the content available to them. It will also change based on the brand’s goal and the outcomes they hope to effect. But it always starts with a view on helping solve the site users’ needs. Because if we are not assisting the visitors in solving their problems, we cannot help clients achieve their goals.

An example of this engagement framework:

RESEARCH

The research stage should be set up to measure any user’s actions on the site that suggest they are interested in learning more about the brand’s products or services.

In this example, the research stage could include tracking behaviors like scrolling down the home page, reaching the “feature products” section, and clicking on one of these featured callouts. We could then measure the difference in the behavior of users who instead use the links in the top navigation to reach the product pages.

Why This Matters

If we find that new visitors who go on to convert are more likely to use the top navigation than featured callouts, then perhaps we need to develop better clarity in the featured product callouts. Alternatively, we could test if raising the placement of these callouts higher on the page would help more visitors reach the product page and result in a higher conversion rate. Ultimately monitoring the user behaviors may tell us that less is more. However, it’s a decision that the team could make based on observable behaviors vs. guessing.

Consideration

In this stage, we want to evaluate user activities that demonstrate deeper engagement, like an interest in downloading content or product information.

For our example, we will look at “ungated” content downloads as examples of users engaging in consideration behavior. Tracking the content topics, format, and overall quantity could tell us a lot about the information users are interested in consuming.

Why This Matters

Users will display different behaviors and content preferences, not just between converting and non-converting users. But I also have differences in format preferences between early stage and late-stage buyers. If your team is producing content, helping them understand which is most effective for engaging a user early in their purchase decision vs. late in the purchase decision can get them to focus on the right content to develop for the right time.

EVALUATION

The evaluation stage should focus on measuring behaviors that include consumption of proof source content.

For our evaluation stage example, this could include visits to case studies, testimonials, or any content on the website that helps validate your product’s or service’s effectiveness.

Why This Matters

Users considering working with your organization will ultimately ask the “who else are you working with” question. We don’t always know which of the shiny logos they are most interested in reading on our case study pages. Are your prospective customers interested in industry experience, capabilities, or how you’ve solved a similar problem for others? If you track user engagement for converters and non-converters, it could tell you how to engage more deeply.

INTENT

Tracking the intent stage is as close to conversion as possible without being a conversion. Here we are looking for actions that show the user is ready to take action.

An example is tracking behaviors like visits to your contact page or for brands that sell through third parties; it could be measuring which users click on “where to buy” or “contact a sales rep” links.

Why This Matters

Assessing intent actions that don’t result in conversion may be as crucial as knowing which are more likely to deliver conversions. This is a great place to look for friction points in your website’s conversion funnel. Sometimes fixing these friction points can be surprisingly easy if you know where you should be looking.

Analyzing non-conversation behaviors will improve not only user engagements, but, ultimately, overall conversions as well.

Taking the time to assess the different elements of the user journey across your website and work to improve user engagement holistically will result not just in deeper user engagement, but in enhanced conversions as well.