In today’s competitive marketplace, the Finance and Banking industry is bound to establish a strong online presence and to conduct marketing activities that will enhance customer experience and support lead generation and cross-selling activities.

But as always - there MUST be a set of measurable KPI’s that are strongly aligned to ones business objectives, like any other organisation that operates with the web being a channel of theirs. Hereby concluding that KPI’s are meant to be acted on and not just reported on. Therefore I suggest optimizing towards the following two business objectives.

Online Finance business objectives:

• Customer Acquisition
• Reduce Interactions Cost

Success in customer acquisition can be calculated by considering the number of accounts applied for by new customers. In addition, existing registered customers may add new account types to their profiles – perhaps as the result of a specific campaign. The number of loan / credit card / account application forms downloaded (if this is the means of registration as opposed to a fully online application) will also indicate customer interest. Loan / credit card pre-approvals can also be a means to evaluate the success of a campaign or a site content update. Finally, interest in products and services can be gauged by the number of visitors searching for agent information or bank branch locations

For tactical decision-making, you need to break these strategic indicators down into manageable segments and analyze their performance by - for example - geography or property, in order to understand how well each is contributing to the overall result; or, assess them by traffic sources and marketing channels to see where you should direct your marketing budget.

But, let me outline a set of leading KPIs which will enable us to gauge the effectiveness of online initiatives and help us steer a Online Finance website in the right direction:

Online Finance Customer Acquisition KPI’s:

• Account sign-up
• Addition of new accounts
• Application downloads
• Pre-approvals
• Locate an agent

Online Finance Interaction Cost KPI’s:

• Average cost per interaction
• Self-service visits
• Response (Emails, Calls etc.)
• Web % of customer interactions

Making the above objectives the core of your Web Analytics strategy and paying attention to these KPIs will give you an advanced level of insight and trigger the most effective changes to your web property.

You can find a complete and in-depth PDF version of our inputs for Best Practices for Online Finance industry here:

DOWNLOAD GUIDE (4 page commercial version 617K PDF)

N.B.
This is the fourth post in a series on “What and how to..” measure a specific industry. You might find the previous posts interesting:

- What and how to measure Online Travel and Hospitality websites
- What and how to measure Social Networking websites
- What and how to measure Media and Content websites