About Web Design:

The Art of Quantification:
Your Website's Return
on Investment

Your website is your kingdom; your web designer is your best friend. You invested a lot of money into this thing and even more time to make it work. Did you put enough effort into measuring your success?

It's hard to win a race without a finish line. Depending on your motivation for setting up a website for your business, you might or might not have a feeling of accomplishment after all your hard work. And unless you got very lucky, it will probably take a lot more time before your website delivers what you are looking for. Nonetheless, you will never know how close you are to achieving your goals without monitoring your progress.

How Did You Get Here?

Even before you decided to get a website, your hands were full. You juggled time to organise quality content for your pages, and now you have even less time on your hands. How can you possibly manage to decipher any statistics on your website's performance? Easy.

The General Idea - Return on Investment

Image Credits to Horia Varlan

There are only few segments of data on which you have to focus, but, first, understand the general idea. You know what companies like Digg, Twitter or Facebook have as their biggest problem? It's the traffic: more traffic means more problems, until you know how to convert it and monetize.

If you had a retail business (maybe you have!), would you like hundreds of people going in and out emptyhanded, or would you rather like ten people with a full trolley at your cash register? This is the essence of conversion: turning every visit to your shop into a sale.

How to Measure Your Website's ROI

If you want to, you can dig into all the analytics for your website for hours at a time. However, you should focus on monitoring, in order of importance:

Conversion rate
Average time on site
Bounce rate
Pages per visit
Content popularity
Number of visits

You probably wonder what values you should look for in each of these metrics. Do a little test: ask a friend or relative to go to your website and contact you. Have them start with the front page. Count how much time it takes for a person who doesn't know your website well to get in touch with you (conversion) and how many pageviews it takes them. Then, try again, but this time have them start with one of your blog posts. How much time does it take to read the article, and how many page views after that does it take to get in touch with you?

Remember, this isn't a very accurate test. The majority of people will get to your website by accident, but if your bounce rate is higher than 75%, you might be giving people the wrong impression.

Convert Visitors into Sales

Image Credits to Martin Kingsley

You could monitor your conversion rate using automatic statistics, but this is not very accurate. Of every one hundred emails I receive, only five are genuine - the rest is spam. The more people know about your website, the more spam you will get. Statistics would indicate a high conversion rate by including the spam attempts.

There is a better way to measure, unless you have thousands of sales and emails each day. Ask yourself: how many phone calls or sales did I get today through my website? Every time someone calls you, ask: how did you hear about us? This kind of feedback will give you an idea about what best gets you new business.

While the number of visits isn't that important, unless it reaches zero, you should pay some attention to the popularity of your content. Especially if you are blogging, look into what articles are geting most attention and consider how you might persuade your readers to engage more with the same subject and how you might convert those readers into sales.

If you are looking for good free analytic tools, your first choice is Google Analytics. You can also try Piwik or BBClone. If you don't mind spending some money, have a look at ClickTale and Woopra.

Why is SEO Not Working for You?

If you have a niche business, you are very lucky. There is a big chance you will get to the top of Google SERPs. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a long, time- (and/or money-) consuming process and there is a big chance you will lose your position with Google's next algorithm update.

If your website is new, you are losing points to websites that have existed longer. You are better off focusing on your content and on social media marketing than on spending a lot of time and money on SEO.

What Does Google Want from You?

This is actually what Google wants you to do and will change their rules and algorithms often to keep you and others from cheating the system. Think about it: what is the whole point of using Google? If you are searching for a specific keyword and click on one of the top page results, you expect to see information you are looking for, right? If people could adjust these results, Google would lose its credibility and accuracy.

There is no harm, however, in making your site discoverable and easy to index by all search engines. This is not as difficult a process as you might think. Of course, you should get to know the basics before you start writing content for your pages. Read the "Definitive Guide To Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Business People" to understand what is involved in optimising your pages for indexing.

How to Grade Your SEO

To see how you are doing, try testing your website on WebsiteGrader or try using some of the free tests by SEOmoz. This will give you some idea and point out areas in which you can improve.

There is one aspect of SEO that is very important: high-quality inbound links. The more of these, the better, but beware of link farms and reciprocal linking schemes, as these may get you penalised in search rankings. Worse, the traffic you get from such schemes will not be relevant and will not convert. Aim for links from reputable websites that are connected to the area of your business.

Make it an Ongoing Task

Measurement is a process. The only way to ensure you are improving is to regularly monitor all the relevant statistics and act on them. You might be fooling yourself, thinking that your website is doing great, or you might be punishing yourself for a perceived lack of results, but the numbers will tell the truth. Instead of wasting time, you will be making progress and generating more business.

How are you monitoring your own websites? Do you have experience with interesting tools? Share your opinion below!