By James Williams
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 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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