How do you measure the success of your website?

How successful is your website? And how do you know?

If you ask most small business operators the answer to these questions is likely to be both vague and diverse.

“Customers tell me they really like it.”

“We get a lot of great feedback.”

“We got our first international sales because of our website.”

“90% of our sales enquiries have come via the website either via search engines or going direct to the site from another promotional mechanism.”

These genuine responses are the unfortunate reality of the online world for smaller organisations.

The truth is that most small business time and budgets are usually so limited that most attention is given to the planning and preparation of the website itself and little is left for the proper measures to monitor and evaluate its success.
This omission in turn means that the business operator really has no clear idea of the benefits the website is providing to the business.

Email responses one KPI among many

I’ve had other clients tell me that their website has been as good as useless to them because they rarely get emails generated from the website.

While website-generated emails are one important metric, sole reliance on it as a measure of online success is both misleading and unfair.

Email is obviously just one “call to action” that visitors can take after visiting your site. Depending on how you direct them, others can visit your shop or office, call by phone, purchasing via a cart, completing an enquiry form or briefing or signing up for your email newsletters.

Then there is the hidden benefit of turning away tyre kickers. How many visited your site and found that your business does not provide what they had hoped? That bounce saves you valuable time dealing with these “nospects” by phone or other medium.

KPI “snapshots” important to collect and measure

So to gain a true idea of the benefit your website is providing, it’s important to collect, monitor and compare a range of data about your website.

This doesn’t need to be overly time consuming. But by gaining this understanding, you can adjust your website and other communications to make further improvements.

Of course, measurements are useless without SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) goals or targets.

What are your KPIs?

Because every single business is different when it comes to product, product lifecycle phase, markets, size, budget, expertise and so on, the online goals of each business will be different.

For some, pure online sales will be the only KPI of interest. But even then, what are the conversion, cart abandonment and referral (where the visit came from) statistics?

For others, metrics like site “stickiness” (time spent on the site), bounces (those leaving the site without visiting a second page) and new visits will be important.
Then there are those that can be assessed by using other measurement methods.

The value provided by the simple action of asking new enquirers how they found you (whether communicating in person, by phone, by email or on your website) can’t be underestimated.

Once SMART goals are set, there is no shortage of ways the data can be used to provide meaningful results.

Some KPIs for starters

Then you can go about setting KPI’s that will provide meaningful snapshots that will help you understand how your website impacts your organisation and what improvements are necessary to gain even greater return on investment.
As a starting point, some you might like to consider are:

• Cost per visit (total establishment and ongoing cost divided by number of website visitors over given period).
• Revenue per visit (total unique visits divided by value of web-influenced sales over given period).
• Cost per online sale (total establishment and ongoing cost divided by number of online sales over given period).
• Sales Value to Cost Ratio (total establishment and ongoing cost divided by value of online sales over given period).
• Value of newsletter subscribers (a tricky one but depending on what other marketing you are doing could be Annual Revenue divided by number on newsletter database).

Whatever your KPI is, you will find it a valuable tool in measuring the return on investment into your online presence.

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Craig Reardon is a leading eBusiness educator and founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which provide the gamut of ‘pre-built’ website solutions, technologies and services to SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.