Return on Investment (ROI)
A full version of this article is available at http://www.managers.org.uk/ (written, July 2003)
Your website is not a separate entity. It is a tool to be used as part of all the other marketing and delivery tools you have. Are you using your website efficiently? Websites can be used to communicate with suppliers, customers and the press. Billing and the status of an order can be dealt with using web pages rather than phoning or posting information – both means of communication cost more than adding extra functionality to websites. For example your website can contain downloads for:
- Information and brochure packs, Press packs and news releases.
- Advertising your other services to regular customers, Special offers and promotions.
- Sign-in areas for your newsletters which also helps to build up your database of potential clients.
- Selling your product if it is downloadable e.g. information or software.
Usability and accessibility
Having a usable and accessible website illustrates that your company is demonstrating its social responsibility as well as trying to increase its market share and audience reach and reduce any legal liability. Research has shown that websites that have been re-designed to be usable and accessible have increased their return on investment.Search engine optimisation
- To check your website is actually registered on a search engine, go to the search engine’s home page and type in something unique about your company, e.g. your telephone number. If your web page is not on the results which return then you are not listed on their engine.
- Design for accessibility and you are also designing for automatic web crawlers, spiders, robots (software used by the big named search engines). Some crawlers only go 2 levels deep and work best with a site map.
- Algorithms for Yahoo! and Google change regularly to counteract tricks such as spamming where a website will contain lots of buzz words to get people to the site. Creating a user friendly site with accessible options selective ‘key words’ which are then echoed in the text (or copy) of the web pages can help your site get included in the directories. Read their guidelines to find out what sorts of site they list. Paying their fee is not a guarantee that you will be listed.
- Know your website's conversion rate as this will help you decide if you want to pay for getting people to your site. Pay-per-click or by bidding for keywords as offered by various search engine companies will only be profitable if you know your conversion.
- Bear in mind that attracting the wrong people to you website, especially if you pay for it, will just increase your ‘hits’ not your revenue. So
- Target the right key phrases and spend time writing good titles and descriptions to attract people who will buy
- Send the visitor directly to a "sales" page so there are not too many clicks to buying your product or service
Other means of attracting traffic
Even if you follow every search engine optimisation tip and find no search engine ranking improvement, you will know that search engines are not the way your site attracts traffic. Concentrate your efforts in other areas.- Branding and reputation management are normally achieved by advertising. Advertising can be done by banners, click throughs on HTML email messages, and affiliate programs such as those run by Amazon, the result being that the user is brought to your site by clicking on something that redirects them
- People also find sites through word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, the traditional media, newsgroup postings, web directories and links from other sites. Many times, these alternative forms are far more effective draws than search engines
- Use the signature file on your email so that each time you send out an email there is a link to your website.
- Calculate your cost of promotion using these equations to carefully monitor if advertising and on-line sales pushes are worth it:
- Cost per conversion = advertising costs/ no. of sales
- Net yield = total promotion cost/ total promotion results
Web logs
If you are hosting your own website you can readily access the web log files. These are long files which contain lots of seemingly random data and are not easy to read. However, looking at your log files this is what you should be able to decipher:- Hits – entire site, average per day, home page. Hits are not a single user. They can be part of page or a graphic. On average 16 hits is equal to 1 visitor
- Page views – average per day, document view. This is more useful as you can see which pages are the most popular
- Visitors – unique, one-time visitors , more than once visitors, length of visit, origin of visit
- What type of browsers your visitors use, who they work for, what time of day they visit their site
- Where they were referred from e.g.
- a search engine and the words they used. Knowing what people are looking for can help you attract more customers and whether it is something generic such as ‘running shoes’ or specifically you by your brand ‘Reebok’
- a portal e.g. Oxmedianet. You can judge whether your website listings are working
- Monitoring – for deciphering what people want and how to get them to stay longer on your site
- Feedback – trying to provide a better user experience by personalising the site according to demographics
- Leverage – increasing customer profitability by cross-selling, customer profiling and providing customer satisfaction
- Strategic – optimising your business model, getting rid of low-margin customers, tracking customer life-time value
Measuring the site: benchmarks
Some benchmarks you can easily calculate using your web log information are as follows:- Stickiness = total no. of time spent on a page/ total no. of visitors
- Freshness = average content area refresh rate/ average section visitor frequency
- Skip factor = no. of visitors who skip intro scripts/ no. who don’t skip * 100
- Migration = average no. of exits from an area/ average no. of visits to an area * 100
- Focus = average no. of pages visited in a section/ total no. of pages in the section * 100
- First purchase = required clicks to purchase/ actual clicks to purchase