The first article of this series discussed page views per session as a kind of early warning system key performance indicator (KPI) for your website. The second discussed time on site as another warning flag. Both of these articles show specific measurements used to forecast site problems. There are lots of KPI's you can set up to warn you of impending doom or better show your successes but to go through each one would take me till the end of next year. So to wrap up this series, this article will discuss the general metrics you should be looking at as an 'e' Business and more importantly why you should be looking at them.
'e' Business metrics
The term 'e' Business was coined by Ogilvy and Mather for IBM in November of 1997 and has stuck around ever since. Great advertising, of course it came from e-commerce which was a general term, but I can still remember the IBM jingle and the ads showing IBM's vision of networked computing. There was nothing wrong with the IBM idea or their adverts. However, one problem with this 'e' part is that for some reason people decided that the Internet was not like other marketing mediums.
Everything became "e or i something", it became associated with the brave new world of fast moving VC led consortiums buying and selling companies based on their Business plans and little else. No-one measured success by ordinary standards any more, you didn't need to pay rents, have credit history, loyal customers or reliable revenue, just a great idea and guts.
Great ideas aren't measurable and neither are guts!
We all know what happened next of course. The normally cautious VC's realized they had made some really stupid moves and pulled their money out before they went bankrupt. This starved the companies that they actually helped to mismanage and put a lot of otherwise talented individuals on the dole (sent them down the river, took away their jobs, you get the picture!).
So why did ordinarily savvy business men and women jump on this particular bandwagon? And why did IBM, Dell and other notable bricks and mortar Businesses survive the dot bomb where so many failed?
Survival was down to 'e' Business as usual
IBM, Dell and the likes simply developed their businesses by doing what they already knew worked and applied what new business intelligence they could glean from the Internet to help them with their existing strategies. In other words they used new information from web analytics in combination with real business metrics to develop online Business plans. There wasn't anything particularly clever about it, it was common sense and all the metrics had one thing in common, they were controllable.
Web Business metrics you can control
There are hundreds of reports you can get from web analytic systems and if you know what you're doing they can really help you. Things like bounce rates, entry and exit pages, scenario analysis, first time versus repeat buyers etc. are all extremely important to measure and build upon. They are individual KPI's I mentioned at the beginning of this article.
However the only metrics which you as an e-Business can directly control are average sale price, profit margin, overhead, conversion rate and visitors. You probably won't see 2 or 3 of those 5 metrics reported in most web analytic systems, simply because it's not down to a web measurement system to tell you what your profit margin or overhead is, though most good ones can manage average sale price, conversion rate and visitors.
Why these 5 metrics?
Let's take a look at t
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