Measuring Project Success Through Analytics

Measuring the success of a project is dependent on having the proper analytics in place to capture meaningful data. Optimized analytics that are based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will provide valuable insights into your digital investments and enable data-driven decisions.

While project success can look different for every client and website, the approach to measure success includes the same 3 steps:

• Identify key performance indicators
• Optimize analytics to capture meaningful data
• Take a continuous enhancement approach, based on data-driven insights

1. Identify key performance indicators

Project success starts with identifying KPIs. As you build project requirements, you should define KPIs in the process. Having KPI discussions from the start will empower you and the developers to understand how success will be measured, and to be able to build towards that goal. Developers will build features in a manner that allows for the proper data to be captured and reported. 

As requirements are built, each feature matching 1 or more of these requirements should have an associated KPI:

• Critical and part of the minimum viable product (MVP)
• Revenue-generating
• User conversion point

This criteria will allow you to capture meaningful data and avoid being overwhelmed by all the potential data points that you could capture.

2. Optimize analytics to capture meaningful data 

As you establish project requirements and identify the features that will need a KPI defined, collaborate with key stakeholders to identify the specific data points to be captured, and strategize the best way to do so. At I-ology, we use custom Google Analytics tracking and custom Umbraco back-office plug-ins. 

We have found that choosing the proper analytics platform is dependent upon:

• What is being tracked
• Reporting needs
• Available budget

By selecting the proper analytics platform, you will be able to easily measure KPIs and report on the success of the project. This approach will also keep your analytic views more organized and focused. Since there are endless possible data points that can be captured and compared, you want to make sure that you are spending your time analyzing valuable data.  

A critical step that occurs after the data and platform are defined is identifying the benchmark against which analytics and success will be measured. Know where you started, so you can effectively measure growth and improved performance. 

3. Take a continuous enhancement approach based on data-driven insights

The data should then help drive edits, modifications, and future  enhancements. Digital products are never one and done efforts, but require constant evolution and continuous improvement. 

Therefore, using benchmarks as the baseline you CNA begins to measure KPIs over the proper length of time for each feature. Depending on the product feature(s), it could take several months to fully measure ROI.

The data should inform stakeholders as to how each feature is performing against expectations. Having the proper analytics in place, you can quickly make adjustments based upon data. These post-launch adjustments should be a part of the continuous enhancement methodology and approach. 

The benefits of having strategic KPIs and analytics go beyond measuring the success of a specific project. The process outlined above will propel your business forward in your digital transformation. As digital transformation experts, I-ology is here to provide you with consulting and services required to build and measure successful projects. Let’s start a conversation – contact us.