Monday, May 11, 2009

Your Website Performance, How To Evaluate It?

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 defines 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 efficiency 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 ).

Please leave a comment. We would be glad to hear from you. More on this tomorrow.
copyright Dan and Deanna "Marketing Unscrambled"

4 comments:

Peter Baca said...

Hi Dan & Deanna,

Your post had some great information on websites! It is always a good idea to see how effective the website is at attracting visitors and sales.

I like the idea of setting goals....then develope the methodology to get there.

Best Regards

Pete Baca
The Car Enthusiast Online

Marketing Unscrambled, Home edition said...

Thank you Peter for the nice comments. Setting goals and developing the site with those goals in mind makes a big difference.Have a good day.
Dan and Deanna "Marketing Unscrambled"

Hilary Melton-Butcher said...

Hi Dan and Deanna .. thanks for all this info .. and the monthly visitors, and conversion rate etc .. really useful

Hilary Melton-Butcher
Positive Letters

Marketing Unscrambled, Home edition said...

Hilary, we are glad that you find the information useful. Have a good day.
Dan and Deanna "Marketing Unscrambled"