Hopefully, many of you with a website have at least a few primary goals set for it. You may be trying to sell a product, get subscribers, educate, and the list goes on. Do you have goals set for those goals though? If you want to improve your website, having performance goals for your primary goals is a required step.

Performance in Action

Having a performance goal is a little more than, I want one sale out of every 100 visitors. Though that does make a good performance goal to have, you can really get a lot more detailed. Let’s say you are trying to sell something. Do you know how long it takes a visitor to place an order? A performance goal in this case could be to reduce the time it takes to make an order.

Some potential items to set performance goals for:

• Time it takes to complete a form
• Time it takes to complete a sale
• The number of mouse clicks required to complete a form or sale
• How many clicks it takes to navigate to a popular product or article
• Response time for visitor email or live chat help
• Time it takes for a web page to load
• Time it takes to find archived content

Having performance goals for your primary website goals will help you identify possible user difficulties, and more importantly, increase the chance that your visitors will complete those primary goals.

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