Compare Your KPIs To The Best In Financial Services
/ TweetThe “financial services” industry is a big ole bucket.
But given the other industry possibilities (Retail? Media? Technology?), investment firms have more in common with banks, credit card, insurance and brokerage companies. If you’re a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer looking for data to measure your firm’s digital performance against, you could do worse than look at “financial services” benchmarks.
Smartphone, Tablet, Website Benchmarks
Specifically, Adobe this week published some benchmark data you might find useful. The Adobe Digital Index “Best Of The Best Benchmark” report is based on 210 billion visits in 2013 to 11,000 mostly large enterprise Websites that are customers of Adobe Analytics. The review set included “a few thousand financial services companies. We don’t break out our samples to any level beyond financial services,” according to Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Digital Index.
Adobe reported on the performance of financial services and four other industries (retail, travel and hospitality, high-tech, and media and entertainment) on five key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Share of smartphone visits
- Share of tablet visits
- “Stick rate” (the percentage of visits that include more than one page)
- Pages per visit
- Minutes per visit
Conversion rate benchmarks are provided for some industries but not for financial services because, Adobe says, “financial organizations all have a different concept of a conversion." This makes it difficult to standardize for.
The data show that there’s a fairly large gap between the performance of the “best of the best”—the top quintile in each industry—and everybody else, aka “the masses.”
“The results of [the research] make it clear that organizations that invest in people, processes, and technology are reaping the benefits” is Adobe’s high-level conclusion.
Where Finserv Outperforms
The report provides an opportunity to see how financial services does relative to other industries and where the top 20% of financial services organizations are outperforming their peers.
You’ll want to download the full report for all the insights and data. Below are a few tables I created to isolate financial services. Just call me Parochial Pat. (No, please don’t.)
In the table above, you’ll see that the best financial services organizations lead other industries in stick rate. Almost eight out of 10 visits to the top quintile financial services sites included visits to more than one page. That’s impressive, according to Gaffney.
“Stick rate is very complicated because there are two factors that drive visitors deeper into a site. First, they must be the right visitor so visitor acquisition targeting needs to be optimized. That requires careful targeting as well as testing multiple approaches to discover which ones provide the best visitors.
“But then,” she says, “those visitors need to land on a page (sometimes from their phone or tablet) that works, is what they expected and has a clear next step. So content, responsive design, personalization and clear paths forward have to be in place.”
Bravo, take a bow!
Unfortunately, the best in this industry trail all other industries in percentage share of tablet visits, and all but high-tech’s best in percentage share of smartphone visits.
But above see how finserv comes roaring back in the visits measures—the best financial services sites have the highest number of pages per visit, and trail only media and entertainment and high-tech sites in minutes per visit.
This data suggests that the best of financial services have some significant digital chops. Oh and here’s a look at the year-over-year improvement. Note the big gain in share of smartphone visits.
For your benchmarking, the table below may be the most useful. Above-average performance on these dimensions would be between the range set by the best in the industry and the average.
Wide gaps between the best and the average suggest that the best are pulling away from the competition, which is Adobe’s point in publishing the research. Of course, you'd have a better sense of your relative performance if the research was provided for the asset management subsector.
Take a look at your analytics and see where you stand. Thoughts? Please comment below.
