Simple Way to Evaluate Website Performance

Setting up a website is the first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your website greatly depends on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you are not sure on what your site should accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without website goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be an online announcement that you are in business. I have seen many websites which are mere online announcements. The webmasters of these website usually renew the domains every year, that is the only attachment of that person with that website.

If you expect something out of your website or to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so the fellow representatives or you personally can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is performing at its optimum efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors which came to the webiste in a particular 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 browsed through your website does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually perform an action in the webiste. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who brought a product. This figure is called the site conversion rate, which is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

How to find the site converstion rate? A simple calculation helps you to reach the figure, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action on you website. For instance, if you had 2,000 visotors to your website, out of these visitors only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate is equal to 1.25%. This is how i reached 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.

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

Additional marketing strategies has to be implemented if you find that you website traffic is extremely low. Some of the effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website is by launching a search engine optimization campaign.This campaign will be targetted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pagesfaster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you (There are many companies in the internet who provides SEO services, but beware to choose the best one based on their past performance). In either case, after your have improved yoursearch engine positions, make sure you keep that position by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.