Sorry to use a cliché in the first line of this blog, but in the case of justifying whether your business needs a web measurement plan, I refer you to the following (clean version – five P’s, not six): Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

And here’s another one for you: Many heads are better than one.

It’s all well and good to acknowledge the value of a measurement plan; without a plan in place, how do you know what’s working, where to improve, and whether your website and digital channels are working hard enough to meet your organisational goals?

However, something that is often missed is that having goals that are created collaboratively, with input from teams from across the business, is crucial to success.

Without working collaboratively with key stakeholders to draw up your measurement plan, how do you know what their goals are and how to align them with your own?

Our four-step process to completing a measurement plan puts collaboration at its heart, starting with a stakeholder workshop and building from there to create a more holistic, connected approach to your analytics.

First, if you are reading this and don’t have one in place, it’s important to understand the true value of having measurement plan in place.

You can access our FREE web analytics measurement plan template here.

A measurement plan will help you to:

• Understand and outline core business objectives for all key stakeholders and which soft and hard KPIs to measure.
• Identify the specific metrics that align to your agreed KPIs and objectives.
• Uncover different audience groups and how they behave onsite so you can optimise their experience.

The power of a measurement plan and the data captures can only be harnessed when you know how to use it not just to support business decisions, but to drive actions as well – a measurement plan that’s completed correctly can help you do just that.

However, in order to extract the most value and drive action from your measurement plan you need to get the whole business on board and break down the barriers that are stopping you measure effectively. If a measurement plan is completed collaboratively it will align the thinking of key stakeholders from across the business and manage conflicting priorities to draw up a plan that works for everyone.

The barriers to effective measurement

Modern day marketing is a game of multiples. Multiple platforms with multiple messages, multiple teams, stakeholders and partners all working (often in silos), towards their own multiple goals.

These multiple departmental goals combine across the company towards overall business objectives, but with so many cogs in the drivetrain, the road to effective and efficient measurement is littered with barriers.

1. Conflicting stakeholder goals

Each stakeholder has a different success metric for your website. What counts as success to marketing might not work for your technical teams, or the board.

2. Operational silos

Each department working independently with their own goals and motivations, not always able to effectively collaborate outside of their own silos.

3. Technology gaps

Lack of tools, technology and processes in place to connect data between systems.

4. Resource gaps

Lack of time and resource to draw up and implement a measurement plan.

Overcoming these barriers with stakeholder collaboration

The key to creating an effective measurement plan is collaboration. Bringing key people together to agree shared objectives and draw up a plan that works for everyone and their goals.  It also serves to breaking down the barriers to effective, collaborative, measurement. 

1. Conflicting stakeholder goals

Getting all stakeholders in the same room – possibly for the first time – enables people share their own goals and unite thinking on priorities, efforts, resources and overall goals for the business and, most importantly, the website. 

2. Operational silos

Bringing different teams together enables them to talk about the challenges they’re facing in their silos. A collaborative approach helps the business find integrated solutions.

3. Technology gaps

Bringing teams together identifies holes in the marketing stack and highlights where processes and systems can be aligned for better connectivity.

4. Resource gaps

Working collaboratively to draw up shared objectives and KPIs creates a shared responsibility and ownership over resourcing. This is where employing the time and skills of an external expert can help you.

Get started with our four-step process for completing a website measurement plan

Download our web analytics measurement plan and step by step guide now to get started. The measurement plan will give you our tried and tested template to complete and the guide will take you through the four step process to completing it collaboratively.

Four simple steps to follow

1. Planning - a stakeholder workshop will help you define business objectives, collate key performance indicators (KPIs) and agree measurable metrics.

2. Completing the measurement plan – filling in the template provided using the information gathered in your workshop.

3. Implementation - creating an implementation workflow (template provided), looking at what's been done, what's left to complete and what is/is not in scope. This is the live, working part of the plan.

4. Reporting - making sense of what the data is telling you and acting on the insight.

Following this process should give you a robust set of business objectives representing the single view across the company. KPIs and metrics should then naturally create themselves and by the end of it you’ll have a measurement plan that everyone is happy with.

If you have any questions at all on the measurement plan, or the step by step guide, please do get in touch.