Goals - What should a web strategy accomplish for a retailer

I think it is important for any retailer to have an idea of what his/her web strategy should accomplish. While the overarching objectives are clear - building revenues and retaining customers- the actual metrics or measures remain difficult to identify and much more difficult to quantify. Ill-defined objectives lead the retailer to focus on metrics and measures that are, at best, irrelevant , and at worst, altogether misleading.

To identify and focus on the right goals, I think we should obtain successive levels of understanding of goals till we arrive at those that follow the two principles: the goals should have firm link to the overarching objectives and, they should facilitate easy measurement and quantification. As an example, if revenue building is an overarching goal, one of the ways is to build a community of watch lovers who will act as evangelists for our brand. While this goal has a direct link to the overarching objective, it is not easy to measure to quantify, so we will need to go one step deeper. The whole process would look like the following.

Revenue Building <-- Obtain referrals <--Build a community<-- nurture the community with various community building tools such creation of profiles, interests, etc<-- attract watch lovers to the community

The specific measure then would be the number of profiles created. Other measure could be:

No. of leads generated
Conversion of leads to sales
No. of contact details obtained, etc. etc.