The Power Of A Measurement Framework In Your Digital Strategy

Something that we emphasise at Frankly is that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Every business with a digital element has information coming at them from all angles, yet many fall short at honing in on the key data points and measuring them effectively. There is no “one size fits all” approach; businesses need to decide on their own terms which metrics matter most, and how to measure them.

Just as everyone knows you should measure temperature in degrees, everyone knows that you should at least measure digital success by website clicks and social engagement. But these are just the starting point. In recent years, developments such as new features on Google Analytics and tagging via Google Tag Manager, give decision makers the power to essentially create their own custom metrics and “goals”, and measure what is truly high-value to them.

If you haven’t heard of Google Tag Manager, or don’t know how it works, it’s essentially a tool that businesses can use to put “tags” or snippets of code on their website that trigger from certain actions, usually from clicks but also from users typing, scrolling, or spending x amount of time on a page. GTM lets you manage these tags, and create custom metrics/goals that can then be measured and tracked on Google Analytics and Google Ads.

It can help to break the process down into several steps:

1. What area of our digital strategy are we focusing on?

It could be building brand awareness, or instead, driving online sales, or something more niche. There are a number of potential focus areas, and they will each call for different approaches to what you measure. For example, brand awareness may have you focusing on more pure volume, such as measuring more closely the acquisition channels and backlinks that bring the highest number of visitors, or it may have you focusing on measuring which channels/backlinks are bringing customers that engage more with the website (higher pages/session, longer average session duration).

2. What are the highest-value actions that we want website visitors to take?

If you’re focusing on brand awareness, you might want to lead customers to informational content on your website, or to sign up to a newsletter or email list. If you’re focusing on online sales, you will want to measure sales conversions, but more closely, conversion rate through different channels, and different areas of your website.

3. How do we measure success in this focus area?

This is where more nuanced use of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are crucial. Measuring success is more than just homepage clicks and online revenue. For example, you may have had a big month of sales due to several high order value customers, but if you were to measure high-value paths based on past data, and few customers were actually taking those paths, then your month of success might be an unsustainable flash in the pan. You need to measure the process behind the final metrics (clicks and revenue) rather than just the result at the end.

4. Which users/customers are most important?

This step is particularly key in the final reporting stage, where you might want to segment the users by any number of categories. These could include: Device (e.g Computer users may be higher value than Mobile), Location (perhaps certain cities/countries driving higher value) and even by Channel (segment out channels that don’t drive value).