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Are you giving your website the credit it deserves?

(This article will be of most interest to those Te Aroha advertisers who also have their own domain name websites)

The same old story … an underperforming website … a desire to make the site more effective and a small budget.

First question: What is meant by "more effective"? We have learnt that most clients tend to focus on just a fraction of their website’s value.

If you are struggling to justify your website’s effectiveness and haven’t yet identified and quantified your website’s value in dollars, it’s maybe time you did.

Value comes in two flavours: additional revenue and reduced costs.

We typically look at two types of value behaviours: direct and indirect.

Concentrating on the direct ones:

Sales. How much revenue does the site generate through direct sales? Try looking at your gross online margin. How does it compare to offline sales?

Next, estimate the lifetime value of new customers finding you via the Internet. Maybe they began their relationship your business with a small purchase, but understanding and quantifying what that may lead to is a key exercise.

Leads. Generating leads, not sales, may be your site's primary goal. Rather than just look at the raw number of leads, try to quantify their value, too. Solid offline tracking can show you close rates as well as average sales values of the online leads. If your site generates an average 100 leads per month and 20 of them end up in sales averaging $500 each, a website’s lead value can be calculated at $100: (average leads closed divided by total leads x average revenue per sale = lead value)

Be sure to give credit for that.

Customer service. Your website can be an effective way to service customers at a much lower cost than offline options. If you want to calculate the impact of your website on overall customer service costs, firstly, you have to know your baseline costs. For example average per-call call centre costs, can range from $3.50 to well over $10, where as answering an email can cost $1.50 to $3.50 or more. The cost of a site-based service transaction is usually well under $1.

So do the maths and understand the volume of each correspondence type and the related cost. Then you can determine the efficiencies of your website. For example:

These are examples of direct values that are fairly easy to quantify for many sites. They are also quick exercises to provide the ammunition you may need to justify your website‘s effectiveness.

Don't forget that equally important are indirect value measurements, such as your website’s value as a research/reference tool, as a promotional and awareness tool, enhancing customer satisfaction, and much more.

You should, of course, consider all the different ways your website impacts on your bottom line, but a good place to start is to calculate that impact in hard cash.

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TIP>>> How to See What Pages of Your Site Google Has In Its Index:   Go to www.google.com and type in the search box site: then your url address. So for thames-info.co.nz/yoursite, you'd type in "site:thames-info.co.nz/yoursite"  The results will show you if your site is showing up in Google and if you have more than one page, which pages are shown.