3 Clues to Transform your Website into a Marketing Machine
Did you spend thousands of dollars to get your business website up and running only to find it hasn’t made you a dime? Many of the people I meet have had this experience. Many are paying a considerable amount of money for ongoing ‘maintenance’ where in actual fact the website has sat there for years and never been touched.
Most business owners have one primary purpose for their website, to make sales. the problem is they simply do not get enough interested visitors to ever convert some into sales. Many justify in their minds that its okay and its a good branding exercise. That may be true but its probably not what the average business owner signed up for. If your website isn’t making sales, just how effective is it really?
It is crucial that you understand your website’s performance so you can test, measure and tweak it until it is a finely tuned marketing machine. This is the only way to gauge your online performance and discover what alterations or modifications need to be made.
Here are three clues to help you transform your website into a marketing machine.
Measure Interest, not Page Views
Many marketers today refer to page views if they want to know if a website is effective. While this tells you the number of people who visited your website, it will not tell you if they found something interesting during their visit. Your website can only be labelled a success if it is able to capture and sustain the attention of your target market.
Tracking the interest generated by your website can be done by tracking the number of leads made. This can be easily measured if you have an opt-in subscription form for an enewsletter or some other useful resource. The number of people who sign up to offers like this is a good indication of how interested your visitors are.
The Time a Visitor Stays Onsite
A great clue to help you gauge the effectiveness of your website is the length of time a person stays on your website. Obviously, the longer someone spends on the site, the more likely they are interested in what you do. If visitors are not spending long on your website, the content probably needs some work.
The Number of Pages Viewed Per Visit
The number of web pages viewed by a website visitor can also be quite revealing. If your site has a number of pages you should expect to see visitors view a few pages each time they visit. If you are getting a large number of pages viewed and not many sales, you probably need to improve your ‘call to action’ or ‘sales’ content. If you are experiencing a low number of page visits then it may be that you need to increase your informative, useful content.
There could be a number of things that effect the success of your website as a marketing machine. It may be that you need to make adjustments to your web design. Maybe you need to improve the content. Maybe the navigation needs some work. Make a judgement call and test, measure and tweak a few options.
There are many ways to analyse your website performance. You could use Google Analytics, which offers various web metrics. It’s a great tool and best of all its free. You should personally analyse the data to determine where improvements are needed on your website.
This may all be helpful clues to help you improve your website however, the true measure of success is how many enquires you generated as a result of the website and how many sales were made as a result. That’s really where the rubber meets the road.
