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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: "Not all KPIs are created equal" |
| 3 | +excerpt: "Sometimes it's worth challenging the hypothesis behind a target..." |
| 4 | +layout: single |
| 5 | +comments: true |
| 6 | +read_time: true |
| 7 | +share: true |
| 8 | +related: true |
| 9 | +tags: |
| 10 | + - ai |
| 11 | + - data |
| 12 | +header: |
| 13 | + overlay_image: /assets/images/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg |
| 14 | + overlay_filter: 0.25 # same as adding an opacity of 0.5 to a black background |
| 15 | + caption: "Not all KPIs are created equal" |
| 16 | + teaser: /assets/images/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg |
| 17 | + |
| 18 | +--- |
| 19 | + |
| 20 | +# Not all KPIs are created equal # |
| 21 | + |
| 22 | +I advocate for metrics tied to actual business value, like KPIs, but I sometime see these miss the mark. |
| 23 | + |
| 24 | +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. |
| 25 | +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 |
| 26 | +or at all in searches for our product catalogue. |
| 27 | + |
| 28 | +On the surface this seems like a very reasonable target. We spent several weeks investigating rewriting parts of the single page application to |
| 29 | +pre-render server side to allow the search engines to crawl the data. |
| 30 | + |
| 31 | +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 |
| 32 | +luxury fashion clothes and jewellery. The conversion rate was quite low but the average basket value was very high (> £30k). |
| 33 | + |
| 34 | +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 |
| 35 | +not even searching for our site through search engines. The traffic to the site was driven pretty evenly from fashion magazine advertising and |
| 36 | +social media posts. |
| 37 | + |
| 38 | +Due to this revelation we switched our efforts from SEO to streamlining our registration process, checkout process and started to sponsor social |
| 39 | +media influencers in order to both increase conversion rate (albeit lowering the average basket value) and more efficiently push high value clients to |
| 40 | +the site. |
| 41 | + |
| 42 | +As a happy side effect less than four months after abandoning the attempts at increasing site ranking, Google's crawler was |
| 43 | +updated to more accurately crawl single page applications and our page ranking increased without us having to expend more time on it. |
| 44 | + |
| 45 | +Sometimes, it's worth challenging the hypothesis behind a target as not all KPIs are created equal. |
| 46 | + |
| 47 | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 48 | +< sub>If you want to discuss how to use hypothesis driven development please contact me through the comments, [email ](mailto:[email protected]) or |
| 49 | +[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishowejones/).</sub> |
| 50 | + |
| 51 | +<sub>Photo by [Lukas](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-survey-spreadsheet-590022/)</sub> |
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