Added not all KPIs are created equal.

Author: chrishowejones

_posts/2024-03-07-targets-not-equal.md

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+---
+title: "Not all KPIs are created equal"
+excerpt: "Sometimes it's worth challenging the hypothesis behind a target..."
+layout: single
+comments: true
+read_time: true
+share: true
+related: true
+tags:
+  - ai
+  - data
+header:
+  overlay_image: /assets/images/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg
+  overlay_filter: 0.25 # same as adding an opacity of 0.5 to a black background
+  caption: "Not all KPIs are created equal"
+  teaser: /assets/images/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg
+
+---
+
+# Not all KPIs are created equal #
+
+I advocate for metrics tied to actual business value, like KPIs, but I sometime see these miss the mark.
+
+For example, I worked with an eCommerce software company and was tasked with an 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
+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.
+
+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 devising 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
+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
+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.
+
+Sometimes, it's worth challenging the hypothesis behind a target as not all KPIs are created equal.
+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+<sub>If you want to discuss how to use hypothesis driven development please contact me through the comments, [email](mailto:[email protected]) or
+[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishowejones/).</sub>
+
+<sub>Photo by [Lukas](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-survey-spreadsheet-590022/)</sub>