Marketing Research Chart: Does your organization keep track of the right KPIs?

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SUMMARY: Do you know if your homepage is performing? Our survey of 2,673 optimization experts reveals that many marketing teams miss the mark when it comes to measuring homepage production. Do your marketing efforts reflect this trend in KPI short-sightedness?

View this week’s chart to learn how the right KPIs can dramatically boost your homepage performance.

by Meghan Lockwood, Senior Research Analyst

Chart title: Key homepage metrics marketers track when testing

Q. What was the key metric for each test you conducted in 2010?

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The homepage can be a difficult page to optimize as it typically has multiple objectives to accomplish. As a result, bounce and exit rates (alongside clickthrough rates) are prominent key metrics, telling the marketer how well the homepage kept the visitor engaged, while moving her/him deeper into the website.

Conversion or revenue figures alone may not be useful as objective key metrics. If a treatment reduced a homepage’s bounce rate substantially, but also reduced overall website conversion rate, it may be better to identify the next leak in the funnel and optimize it in a separate test, rather than discard the lower-bounce-rate homepage treatment.

A critical issue lies in the quality of the traffic the homepage directs deeper into the website. The quality of the traffic is broadly defined by the degree of match between the visitor and the offer -- in other words, the visitors’ predisposition to convert. Bounce rate may be a short-sighted key metric if the additional visitors who click through are not visitors who would be interested in becoming customers.

For example, dedicating significant page real estate to a $10 gift card offer can explode the clickthrough rate (and conversely, minimize bounces), but it may turn away visitors exploring a multimillion dollar RFP.

For additional data and insights about landing page optimization, join us at this year’s Optimization Summit in Denver June 11-14.