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---
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title: "Not all KPIs are created equal"
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excerpt: "Sometimes it's worth challenging the hypothesis behind a target..."
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layout: single
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comments: true
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read_time: true
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share: true
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related: true
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tags:
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- ai
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- data
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header:
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overlay_image: /assets/images/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg
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overlay_filter: 0.25 # same as adding an opacity of 0.5 to a black background
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caption: "Not all KPIs are created equal"
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teaser: /assets/images/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg
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---
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# Not all KPIs are created equal #
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I advocate for metrics tied to actual business value, like KPIs, but I sometime see these miss the mark.
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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.
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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
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or at all in searches for our product catalogue.
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On the surface this seems like a very reasonable target. We spent several weeks investigating rewriting parts of the single page application to
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pre-render server side to allow the search engines to crawl the data.
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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
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luxury fashion clothes and jewellery. The conversion rate was quite low but the average basket value was very high (> £30k).
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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
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not even searching for our site through search engines. The traffic to the site was driven pretty evenly from fashion magazine advertising and
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social media posts.
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Due to this revelation we switched our efforts from SEO to streamlining our registration process, checkout process and started to sponsor social
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media influencers in order to both increase conversion rate (albeit lowering the average basket value) and more efficiently push high value clients to
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the site.
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As a happy side effect less than four months after abandoning the attempts at increasing site ranking, Google's crawler was
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updated to more accurately crawl single page applications and our page ranking increased without us having to expend more time on it.
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Sometimes, it's worth challenging the hypothesis behind a target as not all KPIs are created equal.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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<sub>If you want to discuss how to use hypothesis driven development please contact me through the comments, [email](mailto:[email protected]) or
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[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishowejones/).</sub>
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<sub>Photo by [Lukas](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-survey-spreadsheet-590022/)</sub>

assets/images/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg

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