Last few weeks there has been lot of buzz about the Key Performance Indicators, with companies controlling costs, firing non-performers and shutting plants. The profit making organisations have really taken a hit, no doubt about that. While everybody is concentrating on these organisations, I was wondering about the non-profit making ones. I was trying to find out the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for the Non Profit Organisations (NPO).
I learnt that there are many, but what struck me was an article that talked about KPI for NPO websites. Here are some of the KPI suggested:
§ Bounce rate - number of persons visiting only one page compared to number of people visiting more than one page or vice-versa
§ Length of visit (time)- compared to same time last year/month/week
§ Depth of visit (number of pages)- compared to same time last year/month/week
And quite some interesting KPI for search:
§ Number of visitors using search
§ Average number of searches per visit
§ % of zero search results (High % means people don’t find what they are looking for!)
These are all interesting KPI to think about in monitoring website usage - it also is a good addition to the standard measures usually looked at (e.g. number of visitors and page views).
However, one should be cautious about using these indicators. For example, a lot of pages viewed (refer Depth of visit) can be both positive and negative. It can mean that someone is really doing some in-depth browsing - or that someone doesn’t find what they want and is clicking everywhere on the site.
Jmarc Vandenabeele (a WAW moderator) - combined both depth and length (time) of visits for drawing meaningful analysis. He believes that “If you have short visits with a lot of pages viewed it could be negative (sign that visitors are clicking on many pages in a short time to find something) whereas long visits with a lot of pages viewed could be more positive.”
Similarly, the two KPIs for search viz. Number of visits and Average number of searches per visit should be clubbed together, to understand the efficiency of “Search Engines”. Increased number of visits alone will not lead to important conclusions, reason; either the user gets relevant information or does not get it. But when the user’s average number of searches per visit increases along with increase in number of visits, it shows efficiency of search engines.
