How To Evaluate Website PerformanceNelson Tan
February 10, 2009
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 buyers and divide that figure by the
number of visitors. Then multiply that result by 100 (25 × 100 ÷ 2000).
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.
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