How To Evaluate Website Performance

[Nelson Tan]

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing
campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on
how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don't
know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail
to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and
monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online
announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it
is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them,
or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that
your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first
indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the
number of visitors in a given 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 passed through your gates
does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those
visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to
monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This
figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential
element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per
month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed
the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits
to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site
conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of
buyers and divide that figure by the number of visitors. Then multiply
that result by 100 (25 × 100 ÷ 2000).

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.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing
strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low.
There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to
your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization
campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in
search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster 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. In either case, after your have
improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of
them 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.


Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download
$347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com