Be a Thermostat, Not a Thermometer

Thermostats Help Regulate, Unlike Thermometers

Thermometers Provide Information - Useful Only in Context

Why the Right KPIs Don’t Just Tell, They Act

Having seen enough KPIs in enough organizations — as I am sure you have, too — I agree that it’s time to get serious about dealing with analytics. Avinash Kaushik’s recent post talks about KPIs to die for. Naturally, since Hiconversion is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) SaaS vendor, I agree with him that Conversion Rate is #1.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the agreement ends. Typically, the discussion in the market tends to take on this sort of tone. And if you frame CRO in terms of Google Website Optimizer or Omniture, you’re bound to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why do I say that? Three reasons, really:

• Google Website Optimizer is an excellent thermometer. It can tell you the temperature, but can’t actually do anything about it without expensive consulting services, lots and lots of hard-earned website traffic, and extensive technical intervention – unless testing two AND ONLY two versions of your page (A/B testing) over a long period of time and hoping that one of these two pages is a “correct guess” suits your business. And Google Website Optimizer will never actually “act” for you.
• Omniture is a wonderful analytics suite that costs a fortune in terms of license and support. It’s an expensive thermometer with a limited ability to “act”, and unless you have a large traffic profile, technically inclined staff, and analytics experts, it’s generally not going to give you the results you need. It certainly cannot be a thermostat without significant integration to other systems.
• That excludes about 95-99% of eBusinesses who could really use CRO to get more revenue, within a few short weeks, using their same website and at their same traffic levels, with minimal technical intervention or “consulting services.”

I’m not trying to turn this blog posting into a sales pitch for Hiconversion — I’m more interested in analyzing the tone of the discussion in the market, and what it really means to most eBusinesses. More importantly, I think that if we agree that Conversion Rate is the most important KPI an eBusiness can use to regulate its business, then using a thermostat and NOT a thermometer is crucial. Acting in June on temperature readings from March demonstrates the point — act on the data as you receive them, not months later.

An affordable, easy-to-set thermostat is naturally preferable, right? And a conversion rate tool that drives visitors towards the optimal “winning page combination” is very important if you don’t have the technical or analytics expertise in-house and want to keep costs down.

There aren’t many affordable Conversion Rate thermostats out there, but free thermometers can’t do what efficient, effective, and current thermostats can. Be choosy and select the one that fits your business-critical KPIs.