4 tips to develop a successful measurement plan for your platform

1. Define the objectives

Developing a website or app — just like advertising on digital media channels — requires an investment that clients like to recoup. But how do you calculate the Return On Investment or added value of digital platforms?

A strong measurement plan starts with setting the right objectives, which you can in turn measure using critical success factors, also known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs are best determined before you start building a platform and form the basis of your subsequent measurement strategy. They can be strategic, tactical, or operational. Find the right balance between these three levels.

Usually, organisations formulate three to five (and a maximum of ten) strategic objectives to be achieved on an annual basis. They indicate the direction an organisation wants to go. Therefore, in this phase, you should also map out your organisation's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and formulate clear answers to the classic what, how and especially why questions.

2. Create use cases or user stories

The next step towards a successful measurement plan consists of writing out use cases or user stories. These are both tools for making an organisation's goals more tangible.

Use cases

Use cases zoom in on users' interactions with a platform. They describe the steps to be followed to achieve certain goals.

Such a goal could be, for example, placing an order or filling in payment details. However, not all platform users take the shortest path to reach a goal. Some take a diversion. Not infrequently, these alternative routes are overlooked by the measurement device. Avoid this pitfall!

So, when setting up use cases, keep in mind all possible scenarios and dependencies. Dependencies are events that must occur before a certain step in the process can be performed, such as validating an account before an order can be placed.

Realistic expectations & the right balance

Martin Barnes' Quality Triangle can be a useful tool when creating use cases. This triangle outlines the relationship between development time, cost, scope, and quality: what expectations are realistic with the time and resources available?

Our golden tip? Make sure you have a clearly defined scope so that the functionalities with real added value can be provided within the budget and the set time. That way, you can also test unambiguously during the project, with clear expectations in mind.

Once you have included the necessary steps in your use case, it is quite easy to pin measurement points on it. Because use cases clearly and neatly map out the complexity of a system, all stakeholders together can determine the priorities of a measurement device. For example, is your application a webshop? Then you might want to make the moment a user adds a product to their shopping cart a measurement point.

User stories

In the case of user stories, project members write out in their own words what requirements they have for an application. This makes user stories immediately focus strongly on the added value for an organisation and does not involve developer jargon.

To articulate the requirements clearly, helpful prompts such as "As X (e.g. sales manager), I want Y (e.g. to consult the turnover figures of the webshop)" or "As X (e.g. user experience specialist), I want Y (e.g. to measure the steps of the registration process), to reduce Z (e.g. to reduce abandonment behaviour)" help.

Dialogue and participation are key. The perspectives of all stakeholders are heard, and the corresponding requirements are estimated. Once the user stories are worked out, they can be prioritised according to available resources.

3. Draw up a measurement plan

Once the KPIs are established and the use cases or user stories are ready, you can put them into a structured measurement plan. A successful measurement plan allows you to track the progress of your objectives and understand which activities are producing results and which are not.

Whoever sets up a measurement plan must have a good understanding of the underlying data model of all the tools involved. After all, you need those insights to correctly connect all dimensions (which are categorical variables, such as gender or the name of an inflow channel - e.g. Google Ads) and indicators (such as the number of sessions, page views, clicks or conversions).

The scope of your dimensions and indicators is also important: do you want to measure at the user, session, or event level? After all, every user has gone through one or more sessions on a platform and completed one or more events, such as a page view or a purchase.

Performance marketers want to know exactly what happens at the various funnel stages, ranging from impressions (How many times did an ad appear on the user's screen?) to clicks, from clicks to sessions and finally from sessions to conversions.

However, this is not so easy to figure out because while data on impressions and clicks come from ad tools (such as Facebook Ads), data on sessions and conversions roll out of an analytics tool (such as Google Analytics).

Moreover, quite a few organisations ask to include dimensions and indicators in the measurement plan that are not standard in an analytics tool such as Google Analytics. So, you must build in those metrics yourself on a bespoke basis.

A deeper dive into it in this blog would lead us too far technically, but you understand that a solid measurement plan implies that you already consider the construction of these data models during the development of a website or app.

4. Identify micro- and macro-conversions

Online marketing today largely revolves around budget optimisation: which efforts on which media channels pay off the most? Using the numerous targeting options offered by players such as Google and Meta, marketers try to reduce Cost Per Click (the average cost to get someone to click through) and Cost Per Acquisition (the average cost to get someone to reach a certain target) and thus get the most out of their advertising budget.

To set the right priorities, it's best to distinguish between micro and macro conversions in your measurement plan. Micro conversions - such as a call-to-action - are the stepping stone to macro conversions - such as filling in a contact form. As a business, of course, your main concern is macro conversions.