How to measure the success of a B2B website redevelopment

Most B2B website redevelopment projects start with a familiar set of complaints.

The site is difficult to update. It no longer reflects the business. Important services are hard to find. Competitors look more credible online.

Those are all good reasons to invest in a new website. What they do not tell you is how you will know whether the new one has worked.

For B2B marketing teams, that can be difficult to answer. New business may come through tenders, referrals, events, account teams or relationships built over many years. The website rarely gets all the credit for a sale, even when it played a part.

Clients often describe their website as a verification tool. A prospect already knows the company or has received a recommendation. They visit the site to check its experience, capabilities and credentials before deciding whether to take the conversation further.

That is still a valuable job, and it can still be measured.

Start with the job the website needs to do

Website briefs often include goals such as increasing traffic, generating more leads or improving engagement.

These goals are too broad on their own.

More traffic is only useful when it comes from people with a genuine interest in the business. More enquiries can create extra work without producing better opportunities. Engagement could mean reading a case study, downloading a specification or struggling to find the right page.

A useful KPI connects a business objective to something a visitor actually does.

For example, "increase engagement" could become:

Increase the number of visitors who view a sector-specific case study and then continue to a relevant service or contact page.

That is easier to measure. It also gives the agency useful direction when planning the content, structure and analytics setup.

Before choosing KPIs, agree what role the website plays in the buying process.

For some businesses, its main job is to establish credibility. For others, it helps prospects assess technical capabilities, supports tender submissions or gives the sales team somewhere useful to direct potential clients.

It may have other jobs too, such as supporting recruitment, helping existing customers or reducing routine enquiries.

When preparing an RFP or going through discovery, consider questions such as:

• Who visits the website before a buying decision?
• What do they need to confirm?
• Which pages or documents provide that evidence?
• What would suggest that their interest is becoming more serious?
• Where could the website save time for sales, marketing or customer service?

The answers will usually lead to better KPIs than starting with whatever happens to appear in an analytics dashboard.

What could a B2B website KPI look like?

A KPI does not have to be a completed sale or contact form. It can measure whether the website is helping someone complete an important part of their research.

Show relevant experience

Track views of sector-specific case studies and whether visitors continue from those case studies to a relevant service or contact page.

Demonstrate technical capability

Look at visits to capability pages, downloads of technical documents and repeat visits to specialist content.

Provide reassurance

Measure visits to accreditation, safety, quality, sustainability and compliance pages.

Support procurement

Track downloads of specifications, accreditations and compliance documents.

Generate opportunities

Measure qualified enquiries, consultation requests, site-visit bookings or calls from tracked pages.

Support recruitment

Look at job-page visits, completed applications and visits to culture or benefits content.

The right measures depend on how your customers buy.

A manufacturer may care about technical downloads and distributor enquiries. A professional-services firm may focus on case-study journeys and consultation requests. A construction company may track project experience, accreditations, health and safety information, BIM files and supply-chain opportunities.

There is no standard set of KPIs that works for every B2B website. The useful measures are the ones that reflect how buyers assess your business.

Look for signs of intent

Page views, sessions and traffic figures are useful background information, but they rarely tell the full story.

The more useful measures often involve a sequence of actions:

• Did someone move from a sector page to a relevant case study?
• Did visitors who downloaded a technical document return later?
• Are people reaching compliance information from service or project pages?
• Are enquiry forms producing suitable opportunities?
• Are sales teams using the website during conversations with prospects?

Account-identification tools can add more context for businesses with a defined target-account list. They may indicate that people from the same organisation have returned several times and viewed case studies, technical information and accreditations.

This does not prove that the website caused a sale. It does show that the site supported the organisation's research.

CRM data is useful here too. An enquiry total becomes more meaningful when you can separate genuine opportunities from recruitment messages, existing-customer questions and unsuitable requests.

You do not need to turn every useful signal into a headline KPI. Choose three to five measures that reflect the website's most important jobs.

What if you have no benchmarks?

Many organisations begin a website project without reliable data.

Analytics may be incomplete. Conversion tracking may never have been configured. The business may not even have access to accounts set up by a previous agency.

That does not prevent you from setting useful goals.

Start by auditing what is available. Even patchy data may reveal popular content, seasonal patterns, enquiry volumes and common visitor journeys. CRM records, download systems, call logs and feedback from sales teams can help fill some of the gaps.

If the current website will remain live for a while, use that time to improve the tracking. A few months of reliable data is more useful than a year of numbers nobody trusts.

Where no meaningful baseline exists, use the first eight to twelve weeks after launch to establish one. Check that the tracking works, understand normal visitor behaviour and then agree improvement targets based on real evidence.

Industry benchmarks can provide context, but comparisons need to be treated carefully. Differences in audience, market, brand awareness and sales cycle can make a supposedly typical conversion rate fairly meaningless.

It is better to establish a credible baseline than to invent a target such as "increase qualified enquiries by 30%" when nobody knows the current number or quality of those enquiries.

Include measurement in the RFP

Measurement should be discussed before the website is designed, rather than added shortly before launch.

You could ask prospective agencies how they will:

• help define the website's objectives and KPIs
• audit the existing analytics setup
• identify useful journeys and actions to track
• connect analytics with the CRM or other systems
• test the tracking before launch
• review performance once the site is live

We're not suggesting that the agency needs to arrive at the pitch with every KPI already decided. What matters is that it can explain how it will help you define the right measures, and how those decisions will shape the content, design and technical build.

This can help you distinguish between an agency offering a visual redesign and one that is thinking about the website's role in the wider marketing and sales process.

Review what happens after launch

A website should not be judged in the first few days after it goes live.

An early review after four to six weeks can confirm that the tracking works and highlight obvious problems. A three-month review gives you an initial view of visitor behaviour. Six- and twelve-month reviews are more useful for assessing commercial performance, particularly when the business has a long sales cycle.

Each review should lead to action.

You may find that a popular page is not leading visitors anywhere useful, an important document is difficult to find, or prospects repeatedly ask the sales team for information that should be available on the site.

The aim is to keep improving the website once it is live, rather than treating launch as the end of the project.

Make the data easier to use

Tracking only helps if the marketing team can get to the information and understand what to do with it.

That is one of the reasons we developed Mutual One, our support and marketing platform for Craft CMS. It brings useful page-level analytics into the CMS, so editors can review performance while looking at the content itself.

For example, you can see whether visitors continue from a case study to a relevant service page, whether an important document is being downloaded and whether changes to a page have improved its performance. Mutual One also includes content feedback, campaign tracking, Core Web Vitals reporting and regular email digests.

The aim is to make website data easier to use, rather than leave marketing teams with another dashboard to check. You can even build custom dashboards by explaining what you want to see, and have the Mutual One AI find and collate that data for you.

If you are planning a website redevelopment and are not sure what your KPIs should be, that is completely normal. We are happy to talk through the role your website needs to play, what is worth measuring and what should be in place before the project begins.

Get in touch to talk about your website and what success could look like.