Setting up a website is the first step in an Internet marketing campaign, and its success depends heavily on how clearly you define your goals. If you do not know what you want your site to accomplish, it will likely fail to accomplish much of anything. Without goals to guide how you build and monitor it, your website becomes little more than an online announcement that you are in business.
If you expect your site to prompt some type of action, whether that means visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to make sure it is working as efficiently as possible. One of the first indicators is the number of visitors your site receives during a specific period. A good baseline is a month when you have not been running any unusual offline promotional activities.
However, just because hordes of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. In most cases, you want those visitors to do something once they arrive. That is why it is just as important to track how many visitors make a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential measure of your website’s effectiveness.
To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and calculate the percentage who completed the action your site is designed for. For example, if your site had 2,000 hits and only 25 visitors purchased your product, your site conversion rate is 1.25%. To get this figure, divide the number of visitors who made a purchase by the total number of visitors, then multiply the result by 100 (25 ÷ 2,000 X 100).
If your website is set up to get visitors to fill out a form, be sure to compare your site conversion rate with your sales conversion rate. Not everyone who fills out your form will become a customer. Still, whether your site is designed to sell a service or product or to encourage visitors to complete a form, the site conversion rate will help you measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes.
If traffic to your site is extremely low, you may need to implement additional marketing strategies. There are several effective ways to improve the flow of traffic to your website, especially by launching a search engine optimization campaign. This type of campaign is designed to improve your position in search engine results so consumers can find your pages faster and more easily. You can research the steps needed to improve your search engine rankings yourself, or you can hire a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. Either way, once your search engine positions improve, continue monitoring them and adjusting your efforts so you can maintain high rankings.
Another factor to examine is how easy it is for visitors to complete the action your site is set up for. For example, if your goal is for visitors to fill out a form, is the form easy to find, or do they have to click through four levels to reach it? If the process is too difficult, a potential customer may give up and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible and that the path to your form or ordering page is quick and simple.
Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal, of course, is to get visitors to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy should be written specifically for your online campaign, not simply copied and pasted from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.
