In the businesses of the 21st century (and those wishing to continue success into the next decade) a website is an indispensable tool for gathering customers, forging connections and displaying critical information. The best part is that it costs next to nothing to buy or maintain.

Many people believe that their website marketing plan and efforts end as soon as their website is polished and good looking and out on the internet for the world to see. This, however, is far from the truth. While money is not being lost in such websites, most likely they are not generating as much as they could be. But how do we measure this to ensure that a website is generating hits AND revenue? Let’s start with the basics:

First, and most importantly, a reliable web analytics program is necessary. These programs allow you to look into and understand how many customers visit your site, where they are coming from, and where they are going within your website.

Why is this important? While your website might not generate income directly, tracking conversion rates of visitors who sign up for newsletters, send e-mails or call the office will give you a cash value to weigh your web efforts against. Simply stated, such numbers allow you to view what areas need to be improved, and which are generating the most web interest.

Avoiding cost where you can. While it is always important to be making money from a website (whether via e-mails, online sales, or forged connections with long-time customers), it is always important in the end to discuss cost avoidance, especially in regards to your website.

For example, reducing the number of phone inquiries to your company can reduce costs and time to your company. The costs of having a secretary, a human resources person or even a call center constantly on the phone and not productive in other areas is often times a hindrance on the bottom line. IBM, world technology leader, claims to have saved $2,000,000 (two billion) a year in call center costs with an online support section of their website. Even for small businesses, with limited personnel, a simple Frequently Asked Questions section to a website can greatly reduce the amount of calls for easily answered requests. This allows employees to work more on items that could be making the company money and growing the infrastructure.

Calculating the average cost of a single phone call, e-mail or (if applicable) a help page request can provide a base from which to determine which areas need to be addressed. Perhaps too many people are calling to ask the hours? This could be solved much easier if the hours were easily visible on every page. Quite a few people wanting your annual report? Provide a free .pdf document on your website under Resources. The cost savings in the latter case are two-fold. Saving employees from phone time is the first result, but also imagine the cost you are saving in not having to pay for the printing of each one of those annual reports.

So far we have discussed ways to look at the way a site currently runs and how to improve the website based on these observations. Some key questions to think about when looking at the data are:

1) Where are people abandoning the website? What is the last page they get to before they decide to jump ship? Chances are there could be something harmful on that page that turns people away. Look at it closely and make changes.

2) Are people getting to the shopping cart and then leaving the site? This could be cause for concern. Perhaps the shopping cart is asking for too much information from the user, or the way the shopping cart is laid out makes no sense to the end user. Pay close attention to this and fix it.

3) Are people flooding your inbox with annoying questions? Both of these extremes are bad for business. Build a FAQ page for those questions that are constantly asked. Call people to action to get them to sign up or e-mail you for legitimate reasons. Speak directly to each need and make the next step crystal clear. Active words such as “learn”, “ask” and “sign up” are words that get attention (and hopefully sales). Use “you” and “your” to speak directly to your visitor and make it more likely that they will contact you.

Most importantly is to set up realistic goals. A conversion rate of 50%, while nice, is extremely ‘pie in the sky’ thinking. Make a goal that can be achieved and continue to evaluate and re-evaluate the information from an analytics program to help reach the goal.

Here at Red Rocket, we can help you with your future website building process. We pride ourselves in generating not only wonderful looking websites, but also websites that are set up to maximize your ROI.