3 KPIs to Win Stakeholder Support for Your Digital Product

It can be hard to know which UX metrics to follow to best optimize your digital product. Let alone which ones to track specific to your sector within the travel industry. KPIs often vary between online travel agencies, airlines, car rental companies, and other subsections in your orbit. 

That’s why it’s time to get back to basics with the user experience KPIs you track. Regardless of your branch of the travel industry, there are three common metrics every product leader should focus on. 

Critically, tracking these three foundational KPIs leads to some of the clearest, straightforward data you can get about how your product is functioning from a UX perspective. In turn, this data provides you with a stronger, more succinct case when you propose much-needed product improvements to your stakeholders. 

The Case for Key Performance Indicators

Before we get into the three foundational KPIs you should track, let’s take a step back and look at why tracking KPIs matters in the first place. 

You consider your company to be product-led, right? You have to walk the walk. Being product-led means comprehending that your product isn’t just a way to engage with your customers. It’s the way. The only path to authentically improve your product — and therefore please your customers — is to improve the UX of your product. The thing your customers engage with. 

How do you improve your product? By prioritizing what’s critical for its success. And how do you know what’s critical for its success? By absorbing as many data points as possible and leveraging KPIs to synthesize this information in a quantitative way. Then you need to use this synthesized information to inform which product improvements your team addresses first. The ones your customers need the most. 

TL;DR: If you’re not measuring how users interact with your product today, you can’t provide them with a better experience tomorrow. 

The Stakeholder Perspective on Investing in UX Design

You know why KPIs are so important to bettering your product’s UX —  and its subsequent success. No need to preach to the choir. But recognize that the people you report to, the people who aren’t in the digital product trenches with you, might not prioritize KPIs or digital product optimization. 

It’s all too easy for your classic businessperson to get caught up in more logistical OKRs. They work to improve the fuel efficiency of your airline’s fleet of planes, for instance. They think: “The website works. Let’s move onto bigger picture issues.” 

OKRs are important. To be clear. But you can’t let business stakeholders lose sight of the fact that your product is your business from the customer’s POV. And it’s well-documented that bolstering the KPIs discussed below makes your UX better, which drives customer sales and ultimately contributes to your company’s bottom line.

3 Can’t-Miss KPIs to Track UX Success

Okay, let’s talk about the three foundational KPIs at-hand. These table stakes metrics will help you make a straightforward, strong, data-based case that investing in your product will lead to ROI that benefits the entire company.  

1. Bounce and Conversion Rates

These first two basic KPIs go hand-in-hand. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit your website quickly, after viewing just a page or two. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action on a page — such as booking a hotel, rental car, or flight, or signing up for your loyalty program. Generally, when your conversion rate is high, your bounce rate is low, and vice versa. 

In concrete terms, if a user adds a flight to their cart but leaves before checking out, that lowers your conversion rate and increases your bounce rate. That’s the opposite of what you want. And a likely indication that there’s something amiss with your user experience. 

Both of these KPIs showcase whether or not a user has completed the expected, desired action to arrive at the expected, desired outcome. Yes, they are “traditional” metrics — in that they’re tried and true for good reason. Monitoring these KPIS to keep them at the right levels (high conversion rate, low bounce rate) is essential to a seamless user experience and a more lucrative digital product. 

2. Page Load Time

Nearly everyone can get their heads around the importance of bounce and conversion rates because they lead directly to turning a higher profit. Returning to our perennial example, if a customer books a flight — aka converts on a page — the company makes money. Period.  

Page load time doesn't correlate as directly to the bottom line. But make sure your stakeholders know that it’s no less crucial to crafting an effective user journey. 

First off, increased page load time can decimate your conversion rate. Who’s going to stick around to complete the desired action if they can’t even get onto the dang desired page? What’s more, if your page load time lags, today’s users are all but guaranteed to get distracted. They’ll visit another tab and forget all about booking that flight. Worse, slow sites seem less trustworthy to users. They think: “It’s 2023. Why isn’t their tech working?” 

Use page load time as a KPI. Then work to keep this time under three seconds —  ideally two — to increase your chances of converting more site visitors into paying customers. 

3. Customer Satisfaction

The last KPI you should be sure to track is customer satisfaction. Your customer satisfaction rate (CSR) offers a lens into how users perceive your product — for better or worse. If you discover it’s for worse, you can strengthen your user experience and boost your CSR. 

There are tons of ways to track customer satisfaction as a KPI. The go-to tends to be net promoter score, or NPS. But it’s important not to lean solely on this one metric. In fact, any CSR measure in a vacuum doesn't provide enough information to make a judgment on holistic customer satisfaction. 

Instead, combine multiple CSR measurement options, such as:  

  • Questionnaires 
  • Surveys 
  • Focus groups (or a customer advisory council)
  • Reviews 

The goal is to aggregate the data, both qualitative and quantitative, you get from your selection of customer satisfaction measurement methods and use it to enhance your UX and up your CSR score. 

Get the Product Improvement Investment You Deserve 

You and the higher-ups ultimately want the same thing: business success. 

Your job is to get everyone to realize that business success hinges on product success. And you can only make your product better by analyzing the right KPIs and letting the data tell you how to level-up your UX.