Measuring the Success of Your Digital Strategy
Having a proper digital strategy at hand is a crucial requirement for businesses that want their websites, digital advertisements, and social campaigns to be successful. A clear plan of action helps websites attract more visitors, which translates to more customers and business in the long run. At the start of 2019, we shared some recommended guidelines for how to set your digital strategy for the New Year. As Q1 2019 comes to an end, website owners that signed up for setting and refining their digital strategy should be assessing if they achieved any results from their efforts. If you’re one of these website owners, then the following may help you to analyze and determine the success of your digital strategy.
Revisit Your Goals
The first step in setting a digital strategy is to form a list of goals. Similarly, the first action in analyzing the performance of that strategy is to measure it against your objectives.
What were your core objectives? Was it to drive more traffic to your site? Or was it to optimize your ad spend? Did you want your e-commerce business to scale? Or did you want more people to engage with the content that you post?
Regardless of what your goals were, start by noting them down in a list. From there, check factors such as your site’s traffic, ad expenditure, user behavior, product sales, and content subscriptions accordingly. This will help you compare your Q1 results directly with what you had in mind when you started the New Year.
Assess Your Tools Before You Analyze Your Success
You can only move forward with conducting a proper analysis and successful assessment of your goals if you have the right tools to do so.
The fact of the matter is that it’s essential for you to make use of programs and tools that help you breakdown your performance over the quarter. Are you using the tools suggested below?
Performance tools
- Google Analytics can help you keep track of your site’s traffic and its performance in terms of the origins of visitors. You can segment traffic by channel such as organic search, paid advertising, social media, and site referrals.
- Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools can help you stay on top of your site’s search engine configurations. As such, you can make certain that your website is adhering to basic optimization suggestions directly provided by the search engines. The two tools also let you confirm that your site is presented properly in regions that matter to you.
- Event Tracking can help analyze user behavior and actions on your site. Instead of simply letting you know which page of your website drew a visitor to another page, you can know which specific call to action or button made that happen. It’s quite tricky to configure this since it requires technical knowledge, but custom plugins including our own, Click Ranger Pro, can help get even more out of your analytics and data.
- PageSpeed Insights can tell you whether your site is running quickly or bleeding visitors due to lag time in loading content. This tool helps your site maintain industry standards and stay ahead of your competitors in providing a great user experience.
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test lets you determine whether your website is optimized for mobile devices. Since the requirements for successful mobile web properties keep evolving, this test can help you update your strategy from the last quarter.
These tools and methods are considered staples in assessing a website’s performance. Depending upon your requirements and the goals you set from the start, make sure to add or remove any programs by discussing them with a professional. This way, you’ll be able to analyze your website’s performance against accurate and true information.
Talk to a professional
If you want to take this one step further, then enlist the help of a professional – not just for suggestions but for a holistic site audit. This inspection will not only make use of the noted tools, but the professionals will be able to employ their own programs and expertise to read and analyze data in a more effective way. A site audit will provide you with even more detailed findings than you would have been able to discover on your own and as a result, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions for potential tweaks in your digital strategy.
Take Note of Your Most Significant Achievements
When the noted tools and strategies have given you the data you need, you will be able to see how effective your site’s performance has really been over Q1 2019.
If you obtained the level of traffic, sales or user subscriptions that you hoped for, then nothing could be more thrilling. It’s not just a reason to celebrate, but also a way to tell that your digital strategy has been working so far.
But even if your main goal was not achieved and you were only able to obtain half the level of success that you wanted, then don’t hesitate to make a note of that as well. You can’t fix what you don’t measure, so make sure that you’re tracking not just data and indicators but actual results and outcomes as well.
For example, if your major goal was to achieve higher traffic but your minor goals included the decrease of bounce rate and load time, then take a thorough look to determine how all the goals fared over Q1. This helps you cross off things from your to-do list and highlight what actually worked towards the achievement of those goals. This way, you can employ a similar strategy in the future if your bounce rate or load time increases to a point of concern.
It also helps you move into Q2 with fewer goals in mind, even if they are the major – more aspirational – ones. This assessment lets you focus on aspects that need it the most, rather than having it distributed over elements that have already been taken care of as you had planned earlier.
Highlight Which Goals Were Not Met
While you celebrate your achievements, don’t forget to dig into your failures or places where you came up short. Whenever you notice that a particular Q1 statistic seems off, make note of the information and don’t let it fall through the data analysis cracks. This is where you start realizing where things in the current system are not going well.
Even the smallest of details matter in highlighting whether your digital strategy is working for you. That’s why it’s important that any and all observations are noted down, from small aspects to the more major components of your plan. The smallest change to the most incidental seeming web component can have a massive effect – in either direction – so taking a full view of your results in Q1 is critical.
This will help you look at the bigger picture and see just how effective your strategy really has been. You can then push more resources towards the aspects that have not been performing up to your aspirations.
Make a Plan to Get Back on Track…or to Keep Reaching New Heights
If you set realistic goals when you began, then it can be disappointing to see them incomplete after three months. Conversely, crushing your goals is a wonderful feeling. Remind yourself that both success and failures are part of a digital strategy and things can change very quickly…so long as you are putting in the work and paying attention. If your strategy failed to meet the objectives in Q1, there’s no reason why you can’t get back on track with proper planning for the rest of the year. If you reached your goals then now is the time to push for bigger and better things.
Keeping the above steps in mind, make sure to determine the following for the quarter and start setting your strategy to answer these questions at the end of Q2 and beyond.
- What was your most significant achievement?
- Your most disappointing metric?
- Which elements showed the most promise for growth?
- What segments took the most out of your budget?
- Are their points would you like to improve on the most for the next quarter?
- What return on investment would you like to see in the next quarter?
Not sure how to get that specific? We’d recommend you enlist the help of professionals who can guide and direct your business to the digital outcomes that work best for you.
Whether you only want a performance review of your website or need advice on how to move forward with the next part of your strategy, we’d love to have a chat with you. Contact us today to learn more about how our team can help. Our strategies make sure you’re obtaining valuable assessment data regarding your website so that measuring the success of your digital strategy is easy.
