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Evaulating Web Site Performance
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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 coversion rate will measure the
success or failure of your website whenever youmake changes to the site.
You may find that you need to
implement some additionalmarketing 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-upfor. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible,
or does thevisitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If
it's too difficult to get to, the
customer may just throwin 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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