More rewrites for KPIs not equal post.

Author: chrishowejones

_posts/2024-03-07-kpis-not-all-equal.md

@@ -21,27 +21,27 @@ header:
 
 I advocate for metrics tied to actual business value, like KPIs, but I sometimes see these miss the mark.
 
-For example, I worked with an eCommerce software company and was tasked with meeting a SEO target of increasing the ranking of the site to increase revenue.
-This was in early 2016 when Google and other search engines weren't crawling single page applications properly. So the site was not appearing high up,
+For example, I worked with an eCommerce software company and was tasked with meeting an SEO target of increasing the sites ranking to increase revenue.
+This was in early 2016 when Google and other search engines weren't crawling single-page applications properly. So the site was not appearing high up,
 or at all, in searches for our product catalogue.
 
-On the surface this seems like a very reasonable target. We spent several weeks investigating rewriting parts of the single page application to
-pre-render server side to allow the search engines to crawl the data. This was going to be a radical rewrite which would take most of the engineering
-teams many months.
+On the surface, this is a very reasonable target. We spent several weeks investigating rewriting parts of the single-page application to pre-render
+server-side to allow the search engines to crawl the data. This was going to be a radical rewrite which would take many months involving most of the
+engineering teams.
 
-However, during this process we started to look at the data we had around our user profiles and the usage patterns on the site. The site sold high-end
+However, during this process, we started to look at the data we had around our user-profiles and the usage patterns on the site. The site sold high-end
 luxury fashion clothes and jewellery. The conversion rate was quite low but the average basket value was very high (> £30k).
 
 By examining this data and publishing a survey attached to the registration  and checkout processes we determined that almost all of these high value clients were
-not even searching for our site through search engines. The traffic to the site was driven pretty evenly from fashion magazine advertising and
+not even searching for our site through search engines. The traffic to the site was driven evenly from fashion magazine advertising and
 social media posts.
 
-Due to this revelation we switched our efforts from SEO to streamlining our registration process, checkout process and started to sponsor social
-media influencers in order to both increase conversion rate (albeit lowering the average basket value) and more efficiently push high value clients to
+Due to this revelation, we switched our efforts from SEO to streamlining our registration process, checkout process, and started to sponsor social
+media influencers. This increased conversion rate (albeit lowering the average basket value) and more efficiently pushed high-value clients to
 the site.
 
 As a happy side effect less than four months after abandoning the attempts at increasing site ranking, Google's crawler was
-updated to more accurately crawl single page applications and our page ranking increased without us having to expend more time on it.
+updated to crawl single-page applications and our page ranking increased without us having to expend more time on it.
 
 Sometimes, it's worth challenging the hypothesis behind a target as not all KPIs are created equal.