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Achieving Return on Investment from Your Website

Is your website worth the time your business puts into it? Could it return even more profit for your investment of time and money? Find out how to determine the return on investment (ROI) of your website, and how to ensure it's working hard for you.

1. Define Your Goals and Their Values

Driving sales is a clear benefit of a website. But some websites might not be intended to sell products; others may have secondary goals that can also make money for your company. Some examples include:

  • Encouraging visitors to sign up for your newsletters.
  • Getting leads through contact forms and white papers.
  • Signing up for conferences or web broadcasts.

When you know what you'd like your website to achieve, place a value on each of those goals. Sales are easy – your average sale is the value. However, you may need to dig a little deeper to determine how well your other goals pay off for you. How much does your average newsletter subscriber spend on your site? How likely it is that you will convert a lead to a paying customer, and how much will that customer spend? Answering these questions will help you determine the value of each of your website's goals.

2. Identify Your Traffic Sources and Their Costs

After you know how much your website goals will bring in, you need to determine how much you're spending to achieve those goals. Where are your customers coming from, and how much is it costing to bring them to your site? Some traffic sources include:

  • Paid advertising.
  • Search engines.
  • Word of mouth.

The next step is to then assess the website’s effectiveness in bringing traffic to your site.

3. Optimise Your Website Conversion Process

A vital part of achieving a good website return on investment is your site’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Here are some crucial attributes you should aim for when preparing your website:

  • A seamless, user-friendly website architecture that will lead visitors to the sale.
  • Effective website text that is persuasive and has striking headlines and calls to action.
  • A streamlined process to actuate the intended conversion.

Once you have gone through these five steps and made improvements to your website, it’s time to measure the effect.

4. Track Your Conversions

To know how your marketing is performing, examine how the traffic from each source behaves on your site. The easiest way is to use an analytics program to track how traffic moves through your site. Analytics programs have many benefits, but the important one when calculating ROI is that you can find how many conversions you receive from each traffic source. From your resulting ROI calculations, you will find out which traffic sources have the highest return on investment, and consequently be able to concentrate your efforts (and your marketing budget) there.

5. Track, Improve, Track, Improve

Even if your website has an acceptable return on investment, you can always improve. Use your ROI calculations as a starting point and tweak your conversion rate to boost the effectiveness of your marketing. By carefully monitoring your ROI, you'll know whether your tweaks are working and where to concentrate your efforts.

Return on investment is one of the most important calculations to improve profitability. You can easily see which marketing tactics are the most successful, track the success of the changes you make, and determine where to focus your efforts. Call 08452 579606 if you would like to improve your website return on investment.