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Use our hub pages as a reference to get up-to-speed on all the main digital marketing techniques. They will help you quickly understand how to make the most of the technique through definitions and recommendations on our member resources and blog articles covering strategy, best practices and the latest statistics.

Most reporting systems spew too many measures to be manageable, so you need to pick your "critical few" which you should use to make a difference. We review how to pick them for different types of business.

Defining goals and KPIs quick guide

Defining goals and KPIs success factors

For a pureplay online business, your focus on objectives has to be to set realistic targets to grow the business. But grow what?

We think it helps to simplify growth targets into visitor volume, quality and value. Examples of objectives are:

1. Volume. These are your objective for the size of audience you will reach on your site measured through unique visitors or visits. With a new or startup business you want to grow your brand so you should have a KPI of brand mentions and searches.

2. Quality. These are objectives for achieving interaction and conversion with site visitors. Conversion rates to your add-to-basket and checkout to sale are all important here.

3. Value. This is the £, € and $ overall and profit. Look at both short-term and long-term value. You should set objectives for growing average order value. You should also at longer-term objectives of repeat customer order value based on repeat customer conversion rate as a KPI. With a new business it's particularly important to break this down into second order conversion over a time period.

Although you don't hear it discuss so much I think Revenue per visit is a useful objective since this combines quality and value - it shows you the efficiency of your conversion journeys and site merchandising.

To relate objectives to strategies to achieve them and KPIs to assess whether you're on track I suggest you create a table like this one linking objectives to strategies and KPIs  for each of RACE.

Key techniques for Defining goals and KPIs

These are the related techniques which we recommend as important for managing Defining goals and KPIs effectively. View these hub pages giving details on best practices, statistics and examples for these techniques:

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