What is a Web Visitor Worth to You? (or ROI for Dummies)

What is your ROI (Return on Investment)?

What is the value of a website visitor in your online business? Determining your ROI for all your business expenses is critical. Whether you do business on or offline, things like your labor, your advertising, and your utility costs must be kept in line to remain profitable.

Determining the value of your website must also be scrutinized, and figuring out the value of a site visitor is another piece of the pie. How else will you know if you're getting your moneys worth? If you do advertise in print, radio or TV, you likely have a method for tracking where your business comes from, but for your website alone, it's fairly easy.

What is a "Conversion"?

Whatever your goal is for defining a web visitor as a success, then that's the "conversion". Define for yourself what the "conversion" is that you want to track. How you define that is up to you. If you want to call it a sale, great, that makes it easy. If a phone call or a completed email contact form is your goal, then that's the "conversion". There are some sites who's only goal may be to get traffic, so you're already done. Now you need to determine the rate at which those visitors are "converting".

How do you determine the "Conversion Rate"?

Look at your website statistics program, (This assumes that all web-hosts now supply even the most basic free statistics program with your domain hosting) and get your UNIQUE VISITORS count for the month. Forget your page count, "hits", or "page views" or any other stat. You want the UNIQUE VISITOR COUNT for the month. Then, you divide the number of conversions, by the UNIQUE VISITOR COUNT to get the conversion rate.

Once you know the following facts about your website to be true...