Evaluating Website Performance
Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet
marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site
depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your
website goals. If you don't know what you want your site to
accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.
Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your
website, all your site will be is an online announcement that
you are in business.
If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action,
whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative
can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you
can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak
efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is
working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given
period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which
you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional
activities.
However, just because hoards of people have passed through your
gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want
those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally
important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who
made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate,
and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.
To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors
per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually
performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if
you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased
your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get
this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure
by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that
result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100).
If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form,
make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your
site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is
because not everyone who fills out your form will actually
become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to
sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a
form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or
failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.
You may find that you need to implement some additional
marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is
extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve
the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a
search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted
at increasing your position in search engine results so that
consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either
research the steps you need to take to improve your search
engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company
to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved
your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them
by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain
high positions.
Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to
your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for.
For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form,
is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go
through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get
to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to
another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the
path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.
Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website.
The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase
or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared
to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from
your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference
between profit and loss in your online campaign.