How to set goals for a website

How to define SMART website objectives

There are five main areas that website goals fall under, so the first step is to define what your website can offer each area.

• GOAL 1
  Sales – your website should be generating sales or quality leads.
  
  
• GOAL 2
  Customer Service – think about how you can make your website part of your customer service offering. For example by providing your contact details and answers to frequently asked questions.
  
  
• GOAL 3
  Reducing Costs – could your website save money? For example, by putting information online you could reduce print, postage and service costs.
  
  
• GOAL 4
  Customer Interaction – a website doesn’t have to be a one-way street. Could you use it to allow customers to communicate with you through content such as surveys, articles and competitions?
  
  
• GOAL 5
  Building your brand – what experience do you want your website visitors to have and how does that fit in with your brand?

Go through the steps above and think how your website can achieve each one. Set SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic) objectives. A typical example would be to increase website leads by 20% over the next 12 months.

How to measure your website objectives

The way in which you measure website objectives needs to be meaningful and not just based on visitor numbers. For your website objectives to be useful, you need to create goals that relate to each one.

These website goals can then be tracked with your website analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) and / or set up as reports so that you can see if your website is achieving the desired results.

Some examples of measurable website goals that you might create are:

Sales

• Appointment request forms returned
• Sample requests
• Call back requests
• Demo requests
• Online purchases

Customer Service

• FAQs page visits
• Enquiry form submissions
• Clicked email links

Cost Reductions

• PDF downloads (reduces print and postage)
• Online enquiries (saves time)
• Live chat sessions (saves telephone costs)

Customer Interaction

• Survey completions
• Competition entries
• Article page visits
• Event sign ups
• Registration form submissions

Brand Building

• Website feedback forms
• Video views
• Time spent on key pages

Website goal examples

Once you have website goals in place, you can devise the tactics required to achieve the goals. Below are examples of our website goals and the tactics we employed to achieve them:

Website Goal: Sales

Tactic

• Generate quality enquiries by showing experience, clients and case studies

Measurable goals

• Enquiry form and email links tracked in GA4.

Website Goal: Client Service and Cost Reduction

Tactics

• Provide online support for website customers
• Replace printed support material with web pages

Measurable goals

• New vs Returning visitors accessing the online guide gives an idea of how useful people find it
• Popular pages in the guide can identify common requirements, unpopular pages help identify features customers don’t know about or aren’t interested in
• The online guide does not require printing which saves costs

Website Goal: Customer Interaction

Tactic

• Online registration and payment for training courses

Measurable goals

• Successful online registrations via a third-party booking system
• Unique email address on training course pages to help attribute leads

Website Goal: Brand Building

Tactic

• Promote case studies and articles through external channels to demonstrate our work and expertise

Measurable goals

• Google Analytics goal tracking for enquiries that originate from social media and email campaigns

You can see that by having tactics in place, you already start to make decisions about your content plan. This in turn will influence your wireframes and ultimately your website design.

Proper planning isn’t just important when designing a website – proper planning designs your website for you!

Setting Website Objectives

GA4 and beyond

A lot of website goals, especially ones based around content and interaction, can be tracked using web analytics such as GA4 (Google Analytics). Find out more about how you can improve your website performance with GA4 events.

There are also other tracking tools such as heat maps and live recording that can provide even more information on how your B2B website functions in relation to its goals.

By defining and setting your website objectives and goals you can gain valuable insights into the real performance of your B2B website. The data you acquire will let you evaluate what is working, what isn’t, and where improvements should be made.

This approach allows you to remove subjective decisions from the evolution of your  website and instead have a focused marketing tool based on informed decisions that you can back up with data and reports. So next time someone asks “how’s our website doing?”, you’ll be prepared.