All businesses have a number of metrics that need to be followed and tracked. It is very difficult for e-businesses to discover and understand which key performance indicators (KPIs) are most important in improving funnel optimization.
Most business owners are overwhelmed by the amount of data, give up, and fail to reap the benefits. But tracking funnel optimization KPIs can provide you with insights about business performance. You can then take action to improve your targets and propel your growth and profitability.
Clarify Business and Website Goals
You have to know what needs to be measured before you can start tracking and improving funnel optimization KPIs. If you aren’t aware of which KPI’s to optimize, you’ll be groping around in the dark and getting nowhere.
Setting the right goals for your marketing optimization program is one of the most important steps for improving your KPIs. But that depends entirely on your business and website models.
When you are strategizing to improve your funnel optimization KPIs, you need to follow this rule:
Your business goals come first. Then come your website goals, and then your conversion optimization goals. So you need to examine and set your business goals: What you want to achieve and where you want your business to go.
Then you have to base your website goals on your business goals, and see how you can utilize your website to achieve them.
Finally, your conversion optimization goals should be determined by your website goals.
It is important that your test goals for funnel optimization KPIs always be set so they are focused as closely as possible on revenue generation activities. This means that you should optimize, for example, direct sales, qualified leads generated, and average order value.
The tactical level of optimization is important, and includes things like button placement, color and size, form fields, social media, and pop ups within your website to engage the audience. But this can’t generate the insights that are required to derive the powerful hypotheses necessary for proper optimization.
Moreover, the curve for tactical optimization peaks pretty quickly, and then there are no more customer satisfaction benefits to be derived.
You should focus on building a strategic process, since it is based on more fundamental and continuous improvements. This can provide insights and hypotheses that can be used to fulfill business goals and can be repeated or replicated.
Funnel Optimization KPIs Metrics
Once the various stages of a sales funnel have been identified and defined, its optimization is heavily dependent on key metrics and their continuous scrutiny and analysis at each stage.
You should constantly look at these metrics in order to assess whether you are deficient in any area. You should examine your funnel for any blockage or leaks and try to repair the situation before it causes damage to your funnel and affects your sales and marketing figures.
This continuous appraisal is essential to the efficiency of your marketing team.
You will encounter different types of leads, which is why it is important to also consider your metrics for each segment of leads.
Examining your leads in depth provides you with insights about each lead segment, and you can see which ones are working better for your business and which are not. It also provides you with a clear picture of each segment and allow you to gauge its potential. You can then use this knowledge to exploit more opportunities.
Stay as Close to Revenue as Possible
As we said before, your conversion optimization goals should be as revenue-oriented as possible. Ideally, funnel optimization KPIs are recorded only after purchases have been made.
There is a list of the most typical and desirable metrics for conversion optimization at the end of this article. But it goes without saying that the most significant goals will be completely dependent on your website goals.
Good planning and great execution are essential for conversion optimization. Tests of individual metrics should help you develop your knowledge about and understanding of your customers, which will eventually lead to increases in sales.
Final Remarks
For every test that you run, you should document why you are running it and what customer needs you hope it will address. It is far more important to create hypotheses based on testing part of your organizational structure than to constantly tweak your website and its elements.
When it comes to conversion optimization strategy, each test provides more insights that present you with more hypotheses that need testing. Each test provides you with an opportunity to learn and eventually leads to better conversions.
If you are looking for the best results, you should definitely concentrate on an ongoing and structured process of continuous learning and improvement over time. Some ideas for metrics (thanks to Hubspot and WiderFunnel) guiding you on this way could be:
- Visitor-to-lead conversion rate
- Lead-to-MQL conversion rate
- % sales accepted leads
- Lead work rate
- MQL-to-opportunity conversion rate
- Opportunity-to-customer conversion rate
- Lead-to-customer conversion rate
- Sales cycle length
- Average cost per sale
- E-commerce purchase conversion rate
- Average order value
- Return on ad spending
- Revenue per visitor
- Lead generation inquiry conversion rate
- Software download conversion rate
- Trial registration conversion rate
- Click-to-call conversion rate
- Click-to-chat conversion rate
- Request a quote conversion rate
- Request a demo conversion rate