Calculating Web Site Performance

Setting up a website is the initial 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 master, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to aid you in developing and observing 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 get in touch with them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is running at peak efficiency. One of the first measures 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 calculation is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because loads of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is thriving. 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 number is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the value of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and determine the percentage of them that actually completed 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 result, take your number of visitors and divide that result by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that answer by 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 surely become your customer. However, whether your site is created to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will determine the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

One may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you realize that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are various effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly initiating a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at furthering your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages sooner and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine placement, 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 frequent monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another feature to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to achieve the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your aim is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily found, or does the visitor have to go through seven levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just give up and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly detectable, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Lastly, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The idea is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically accommodating to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The appropriate copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited,an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas ) publisher and search engine placement technology analyst.  You can contact Bob via e-mail at  seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at:  http://www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com/special.htm