This week I attended an excellent Charity Comms seminar on web metrics. The speakers shared lots of useful ideas such as what analytics reveal about your stakeholders, which metrics to use and which free tools are best for measurement. You can see the presentations here and Kirsty Marrins has also produced a fantastic Storify of the key points.
The seminar has made me think that it’s time the sector reconsiders how we measure success online. How many times have you thought ‘we must get more traffic to our site?’ But what does this really tell us? As pressure mounts to demonstrate our impact further, isn’t there more to engagement than chasing ever increasing numbers? If I see an increase in traffic to our site that figure, read in isolation, might sound good but it doesn’t give me the complete picture. Surely what matters is what people do when they visit the site and, in turn, how that fits with what we’d like them to do when they’re there.
One of the presenters, Jonathan Simmons of Public Zone, made the point that analytics must be driven by strategic decisions. He recommended that charities should go back to their organisational strategies and review their websites in the light of them, setting clear objectives for what they want to achieve. Secondly, he advised that context is everything when using metrics. For example, if a charity ran an appeal and noticed a spike in web traffic they might be more concerned if they realised that there had been a simultaneous increase in calls to their helpline because people couldn’t find what they needed on their site. So metrics need to be integrated across online and offline channels to tell the whole story.
Charities are under ever increasing pressures from their donors, funders and other stakeholders to demonstrate impact and meet targets. We can’t change that, but as charity marketing and communications professionals, we need to show our organisations how best to measure and interpret web metrics. Numbers shouldn’t be a goal in themselves; the true measure of success is meaningful engagement. And only you and your organisation really know what that looks like.