eChampions Benchmarking & Key Metrics
A brief outline of the planned website performance data sharing and benchmarking proposals for ‘full eChampions’ participants.

Part of being a ‘full’ eChampion (ie not basic member level) is being able to track your performance and progress, including your performance against your previous month, and crucially against other businesses involved. This is important in demonstrating value for money to the ESF sponsors of the programme, but much wider than this, it’s one of the best opportunities to improve your business online.

Bouncing back...

This is known as benchmarking and brings abstract individual figures to life. How? For example, bounce back rate is the % of visitors to your site that leave immediately within seconds and do not continue to the deeper pages beyond the homepage.

Let’s say yours is 26%. Is that good/bad/OK? Now imagine you have numerous other sites to compare against, even ones similar in operation to yours. All of a sudden the stats can be compared and the best performing sites can offer insight into improving. Ergo everyone gives a little and then gains improvement from being better informed.

Benchmarking.

The programme offers major opportunities to benchmark against other business and to buddy up to look at common performance issues within a sector (eg online sales high volume low to moderate value goods). You could pick someone with a significantly lower bounce back than your site and ask their advice or view their website, drawing conclusions for improvement. If we do opt for a large degree of general anonymity in sharing data, this is where there may be opportunities to disclose the identity of a company to a pair or limited group of businesses all agreeing to form a sub group within the community.

Hotels do it.

This approach has been used for decades in the hotel industry in the UK, one of the most ruthlessly competitive industries there is. In the hotel industry practically all hotels, both large groups and independents, pay to take part in performance sharing groups (LJ Forester being the most popular in the UK).

Giving a little away in return for much more data back that can help them understand their performance against each other, thereby allowing them to plan. It’s about time this approach extended to eBusiness and we want to be amongst the first to do this in the UK. How? Google analytics, a free tool that’s easily installed into your website will tell you bounce back rates as well as a myriad of other fascinating and crucial performance data. We’ll even help you get it installed.

So what are we proposing you measure and upload?

Proposed metrics
1. Unique visitors per month
2. Returning visitors per month
3. Bounce back rate (homepage)
4. Page views per session
5. User time on site
6. Conversion rate (to enquiry/op-tin/sale)
7. Shopping cart abandonment rate
8. % of traffic from paid search
9. % of traffic from organic (free) search
10. Average PPC spend (per click, per month)
11. % of total business volume derived online vs offline (not for sharing individually)
12. Total t/o attributed to the web (not for sharing individually)

These are the basic web metrics that we are planning to ask all full eChampions to monitor, and once a month enter this information into the eChampions website (under development and likely to launch in January 2010). Those choosing the basic member status, ie not full eChampions, are not required to record this data.

Is this a threat? How will the data be shared?

Is this a threat? What if one or more of my competitors are taking part in eChampions? There are a number of perceived threats to your business in taking part. We are confident that these can be reduced/eliminated by the following:

The proposal is that each eChampion business will be able to see as much information as they are willing to share. Beyond a limited amount of compulsory categories (bounce back rate) an eChampion participant business can opt out of any individual metric, therefore they will not receive the data on other eChampions for any category they have opted out of.

Additionally there will be a form of non-disclosure agreement outside eChampions of the data and that no data will be visible beyond eChampions to search engines and 3rd parties etc.

A unique opportunity

The eChampions Benchmarking and Metrics feature represents an outstanding opportunity to compare your business against others in order to improve your prospects and profitability. In return for sharing some data, your own performance info becomes usable and meaningful. There are perceived risks but the net benefit outweighs these and the flexibility to selectively opt out in exceptional circumstances means we are confident we can mitigate the risks maximise to usefulness and bottom line benefits of this unique opportunity.