Setting measurable goals for your B2B website

What is the goal of your B2B website?

Part of the web design process is to establish what you want your B2B website to achieve. Once you know this, setting and monitoring the website’s objectives is key to its long term success.

By having clear objectives from the start, you can stay focussed on what the website is designed to achieve, not just what you think should be improved at a given moment.

Your goals also form the backbone of your website marketing. For example, if your website is all about getting people to download brochures, then you know that your social media campaigns, email marketing and other forms of traffic acquisition, will all need to be centred around this goal.

A good place to start is a "Discovery" session, where you take a step back and ask questions about where your company, its products and customers are now. Download our Website Discovery PDF to get started.

How to define SMART B2B website goals

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

• GOAL 1
  Sales – your website should most likely 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 the 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.

Smart Goal Setting

How to measure your B2B website objectives

The way in which you measure objectives needs to be meaningful and not just based on visitor numbers. For your B2B website objectives to be useful, you need to create goals that relate to each one.

These goals could 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 goals that you might create are:

Sales

• Appointment request forms returned
• Sample requests
• Call back 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

B2B Website objectives examples

Once you have 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:

Objective: Sales

Tactic

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

Measurable goals

• Enquiry form and email links tracked in Google Analytics

Objective: 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

Objective: 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

Objective: 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

Google Analytics and beyond

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

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 objectives.

By defining and setting your objectives and goals you can gain valuable insights into the real performance of your 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 B2B 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.