Would you be surprised to know that most business owners don’t know how to measure the return on investment (ROI) they get from their website? It’s true. In these challenging times, we all need to be thinking about the return on investment of any of all of our activities. The great news is that the web offers opportunities to drive sales leads, convert leads to customers, and increase operational efficiencies – allowing businesses to be more profitable. But even though the Internet can offer those benefits doesn’t mean just having a website out there will make you profitable.
If you want to achieve a better website ROI, there are five things you need to do:
- Calculate your current website return on investment (ROI). We have created a free tool at http://YourWebsiteROI.com/ to assist businesses in calculating their website’s ROI.
- Analyze your website’s search engine strength and website performance. The two key factors that make up your website’s return on investment are the number of visitors to your website and the conversion rate of visitors to your website to a lead (or in the case of an eCommerce site the conversion rate of visitors to your website to a sale).
- Brainstorm ways to improve your ROI. If your website conversion rate is less than 2-3%, I would definitely recommend improving your conversion rate before you worry too much about improving site traffic. We have customers with conversion rates between 5-15%. If you pay money to drive more visitors to a site that isn’t converting visitors into sales leads or sales – it is akin to paying to put gas in a car with a flat tire. More traffic isn’t going to solve the problem.
- Select an improvement you believe will provide the biggest wins and make this change.
- Calculate your new website return on investment (ROI)
You will repeat this process over and over – continually making improvements to your website. Some of your changes will deliver more sales and some will not. By testing and measuring your changes, over time you will develop a website that performs extremely well for you.
