Step 8: Monitoring and evaluation

Trade Intelligence Portal monitoring and evaluation

Off course it is nice to know how many visitors your portal attracts. However, in theory, a visitor may visit your homepage and leave it within 1 second. Not really a qualified visitor, is it?

It is all about conversion… 

The profile of your visitors and their completed actions on the portal are more important than their numbers. For example, ten international buyers who visit your portal to get in direct contact with your exporters, are likely to have a bigger impact on trade enhancement than 500 students looking for information. So, on your portal you want your visitors to complete a certain action. It is all about conversion, for instance:

• Contact us
• Download report
• Register for newsletter
• Apply for event
• Complete assessment checker

Please refer to Step 4 for more details about calls to action and conversion of visitors.

related to your strategy…

In addition, it is interesting to know how visitors relate to your strategy and objectives (see Step 2). If your portal targets, for instance, importers of fruits in the UK, The Netherlands and Sweden, it is interesting to analyse to what extent your visitors are indeed from these countries, and how they perform compared to your objectives.

and your objectives…

Your portal plan includes specific objectives, in line with your strategy (see Step 2). Such as e.g. enhancing the member base, increasing the number of online applications or downloads and to obtain an even more positive qualitative opinion from your clients.

This is exactly what you will monitor in your Monitoring & Evaluation plan! The level of achievement of these objectives tells you the success ratio of your portal.

Key Performance Indicators

So called ‘Key Performance Indicators’ are directly related to your portal’s objectives. If possible, make them as specific and measurable as possible. Some guidelines for effective performance indicators:

• Direct: measure closely the result it is intended to.
• Objective: no ambiguity and one-dimensional. 
• Adequate: avoid using too many indicators.
• Quantitative: numerical indicators preferably.
• Disaggregated: e.g. by gender, industry sector, location. 
• Practical: data obtained in a timely way/reasonable cost.
• Reliable: quality data for confident decision making.

Applied to your Trade Intelligence Portal, some examples of indicators can be:

• Enhancing member base to xx thousand by the end of 20xx
• Increase the number of online applications for events and seminars to xxx thousand per year
• Have at least xx thousands of downloads by the end of the year
• Grow the number of subscriptions to e-newsletters to xx thousand by August 20xx
• Obtain at least 25 online enquiries from Germany by April 20xx
• Increased customer satisfaction rate about our online performance by at least 5% per year. 
• Increase in the time spent on the portal by 10% in one year
• At least 10% of website traffic is generated by Twitter by December 20xx
• Uptime of the portal at least 99.x%
• Responsiveness of the portal to mobile devices achieved by December 20xx

 

How to measure?

Two must-have tools to evaluate your portal’s success include Google Analytics and focus groups.

Optimizing online analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that allows for full web analytics:

• Number of visitors and their origin (country, city).
• Keyword analysis (allowing for optimization of your SEO strategy).
• Visitor flow (popular and exit pages).
• Technology (usage of browsers, mobile, screen width).
• Traffic sources (traffic from search engines, inbound links or direct traffic).
• Social reports (traffic from your social channels).

Google Analytics also offers quite interesting advanced features such as:

• Content experiments (usability testing)
• Tailored reporting
• Linkages to Adwords campaigns
• Heat maps of pages
• And much more.

Google Analytics offers a range of video’s and tutorials to get you started and to make you full aware of all the insights. See below for related resources and links.

Optimizing focus groups

Focus groups allow for qualitative feedback to your portal. Focus groups provide you with opinions, browse behaviour and suggestions for improvement that plain statistics cannot give you. You are advised to apply focus group research (opinions) in combination with Analytics. Together, such quantitative and qualitative analysis provide very instrumental feedback.

Some suggestions when organizing focus groups:

• Composition of focus groups should be in line with your strategy.
• Have separate sessions for each target group since objectives are fully different (separate exporters from buyers for instance).
• Guideline: five to eight persons in one focus group.
• Apply a blend of methods (online assignments and tasks, individual and plenary discussions, open questions and suggestions)
• Use measurable indicators for measurement of opinions (1 – 5 scale for instance)
• Have a professional moderator who is trusted
• Anonymous answers can sometimes increase response quality. 
• Reward focus group members (financially, or through other ways) in order to secure their cooperation for the longer run. 
• Recruit candidates who have a ‘positive critic’ attitude towards your organization. They should be willing to share their honest opinions. 
• Half a day length is more than enough.

Other evaluation options

In addition, you may want to consider the following evaluation tools:

• Usability testing (see Step 1).
• Individual interviews or usability tests with representatives of your group of core clients. The focus should be here on obtaining feedback regarding completion of main website actions and objectives. 
• Eye-tracking research.
• Online surveys. 
• Analysis of keyword searches of your portal’s internal search engine.
• Benchmarking.
• A combination of two or more methods.

Monitoring and evaluation of your social media performance

You also should monitor the success of your social media efforts. As with the number of your portal’s visitors; the number of Twitter followers or Facebook likes give only an indication of success. Some more advanced social metrics may include:

• Traffic generation: visits from your social channels to your portal (the links to your landing pages).
• Engagement; interaction following your posts. Retweets, favorites, likes, comments, shares, mentioning. 
• Social status: through e.g. Klout or Sprout Social. 
• Mentioning: what are they saying to and about you and the trade intelligence service? The more positive the buzz, the better. 
• Customer service levels: response time to enquiries made via social media.

You are invited to read more in Step 5 about social media integration.

Evaluating your promotion efforts

In Step 9 on promotion, you find suggestions to develop and implement a promotion activities for your portal. You can evaluate your promotion efforts through the following indicators:

• SEO performance, following your objectives, target groups and keyword strategy.
• Click-to-open rate of e-newsletters.
• Advertisement return on investment.
• Link popularity.
• Increase of traffic (to specific landing pages).
• Conversion of website visitors (as discussed already).
• Generated leads / conversion vis-à-vis total cost (cost per lead).
• (Mobile) traffic conversion rates.
• Decreased bounce rate.
• Opinions of stakeholders about quality of brochures, newsletters and the like.