Evaluating Your Website’s Performance

The initial start of an Internet marketing campaign is the setting up of your website, with the success or failure of your site depending greatly on how well you have defined your website’s goals. If you’ve no idea what you want your site to accomplish, it will likely be doomed to fail. Unless you have goals as a guide to develop and monitor your website, all your site will be is an online presence announcing that you are in business. 

You will, perhaps, be expecting your site to stimulate some form of action: form filling by visitors trying to contact you or purchase a product, for example. If this is the case, you will need to determine if your site is functioning properly. One indicator that will tell you if things are going well is to establish how many visitors you are getting within a specific time frame of, say, one month. Be sure to choose a month in which you haven’t been doing any extreme off line promotional activities. 

Don’t be misled by the actual number of website visitors you get. You want visitors to be active while visiting. It’s important, then, to monitor those visitors who have made a purchase – information that is related to the site conversion rate, an essential element of a successful site. 

To calculate the site conversion rate, note the percentage of monthly website visitors that actually performed the action your site was set up for. For example, if you had 1000 monthly website hits and only 25 visitors made a purchase, your site conversion rate is 2.5%. To arrive at that figure, take the number of visitors who made a purchase and divide that figure by the number of monthly visitors. Then multiply that result by 100. 

Though your site may have been set up to get visitors to complete a form, you need to determine the difference between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. Obviously, not everyone filling in the form will become a customer. Regardless of whether your site is set up for visitors to complete a form or make a purchase, however, the site conversion rate can be used as an indicator of your website’s success or failure whenever site changes are made. 

Additional marketing strategies will need to be implemented if you find that website traffic is very low. Various effective methods can be adopted, with search engine optimization being a popular choice. This method concentrates on improving your position in the search engine rankings, which will enable customers to find you more easily. Once you have improved your search engine ranking you will need to do regular site monitoring in order to maintain your position. 

Get a professional evaluation of your website content, which should be specifically aimed to your Internet marketing campaign. Great website content can make the big difference between profit and loss in your online business.