If you’re a service and product owner, at a minimum, you should measure these 5 key performance indicators:
User satisfaction
Slot gameAre users satisfied with the service you’ve provided?
Time to completion
Slot gameThe average time it takes for a user to get from the start to the end of a transaction.
Completion rate
The percentage of started transactions completed. A crucial performance measure.
Cost per transaction
The total estimated cost of your service per month (this varies for some services) divided by the number of completed transactions.
Cost per transaction measures may give you a rough guide for later cost reductions but it’s the portfolio of services against cost that is the really critical measure.
Digital take-up
Slot gameThe percentage of people using your service online in relation to other channels, for example, paper or telephone.
Tip: Are these measures always relevant? For some services and products, not all of these measures are relevant.
For example, for some content sites where a user task is limited to one page, it may only be useful to measure user satisfaction on that page. For other content sites, you may be able to aggregate individual pages together to measure completion rate, or time to complete.
Time-to-successful-completion metrics are not always customer focused. For example someone may begin a registration process but not have the time to complete it all. They may take a week and not be unhappy about that. Countering this is the cost to your systems of having a transaction ‘open’ for an extended period of time.
How to measure relevance
Consider your goals for the website, and ask yourself:
- Findable: After the user perceived the product as valuable (offline), could they find the product or service in Google etc quickly and easily?
- Accessible: After the user found the product or service, was there anything that prevented them from accessing it (technology, language)?
- Usable: After the user accessed product or service, could they complete their task? Did they complete it quickly and easily?
How to measure the success of your content
With digital products or services that mostly contain information, measuring success is more difficult.
Slot gameCombining a range of metrics and collecting user feedback will help you find out if your content is actually helping people do what they need to do. If not, why not? And do you have the ability to act on this feedback?
Use these metrics to measure the relevance and success of your digital content
| Metric | Category (relevance, success) | Measurement tool |
|---|
| Percentage of users who entered the [task] page directly via an alias, referral, organic search, campaign, section landing page, homepage or internal search. (Note: Only shows you who found it, not who tried and failed.) | Findable, Valuable | Google analytics or another dedicated analytics tool |
| Percentage of pageviews with search | Usable | Google analytics or another dedicated analytics tool |
| Percentage of users who exited the website via the [task] completion page | Usable | Google analytics or another dedicated analytics tool |
| Percentage of video/audio watched | Valuable, Usable | Google analytics or another dedicated analytics tool |
| Comments and feedback provided to other channels (call centre, email inboxes) | Findable, Usable | Dependant on the channel |
How to measure if transactions are successful
When a user completes a task, such as making a payment, submitting a form or downloading a document, this is called a ‘transaction’.
The transactions might also be part of a longer series of smaller transactions, such as case management activity. Measuring what happens to your transactions will help you discover how well your online product or service is helping people complete important tasks.
Slot gameUse the table to decide the mix of metrics, categories, and measurement tools you need. Once you decide what to measure, you'll need to make a judgment as to what success looks like for your digital presence. For example, if users abandon a particular step of a multi-part form it indicates something is amiss, and you need to research the user experience to find out what.
Slot gameThe same applies if you notice a high number of user errors — but you'll have to decide how many user errors are the trigger for more thinking on your part.
Slot gameOther countries use much the same metrics, such as the and the .
Use these metrics to measure if digital (online) transactions are successful
| Metric | Category (relevance, success) | Measurement tool |
|---|
| Percentage of abandonment of each step of [task] | Accessible, Usable | Google analytics or another dedicated analytics tool |
| Percentage of user errors of each field [task] | Accessible, Usable, Satisfying | Google analytics or another dedicated analytics tool |
| Comments and feedback provided to other channels (call centre, email inboxes) | Findable, Usable | Dependant on the channel |
Slot gameYou can also use metrics like the frequency of search requests, search result clickthroughs, search result clickthrough order (to determine accuracy and relevancy of search results) and analysis of search terms to see if people are finding what they’re looking for.
Some sites will measure by linear navigation up and down information trees to measure the effectiveness of their site’s layout. It’s the equivalent of people wandering around on the shop floor of a retail store – where someone observes this and asks ’Can I help you?’.
UTM parameters add tags to a URL so that when a person clicks on the URL, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics for tracking. They allow us to see where web traffic is coming from – the source, medium and campaign name, term (AdWords and display advertising keywords) and content.
Having UTM parameters in place show can show how much traffic originated from a social media post or eDM.
