Identifying what your websites goals are can change drastically from one company’s site to another. There are 5 major types of goals for any given website. A site may use 1 or could possibly use all 5 depending on the overall type of site, the people that are being served, and the size of the company/website.
Measuring success is an important part of tracking your success, making sure you are on the correct path, and see if your previous adjustments are having the results that you desire.
Goals
1) Web Sales.
If you have a product or service that is being sold and is transmitted online, or if you are an affiliate such as the most well known, Amazon.com you must structure your site to serve your visitors accordingly. You must take advantage of impulse buyers, as there is a growing number of them. As of 2003 according to a study by Angus Reid, about 40% of all online purchases were impulse purchases. In order to take full advantage of this you must structure your site well, make it easy for people, and offer them a special deal, or limited time discount.
2) Storefront Sales.
This is a harder goal to measure and to cater to. Like a site that makes its profit from web sales, you will first need to make sure that your site has the correct structure, and make adjustments if needed. You should have your telephone number and directions to your store easily available on every page. A way to help track is to have a seperate phone number on the website than any other marketing programs that you are involved in. You should optimize your site with the correct keywords for your local web searchers. Also, if you distribute your product through retailers you will want to link to them, and have any contact information for that site. Make things easy for people to purchase from you. A sale may be hard to come by and the last thing you need to do is something stupid to shake a few extra sales every month.
3) Building Leads, & Product Awareness.
Some ways of creating leads are through an email newsletter, spamming (which nobody does), or from having an easily accessible phone number (usually an 800 number) on every page of your site. Another way to build leads is to have an informative site, that increases market awareness on your product. In other words, instead of trying to sell somebody your product you compare and contrast it with a few similar products (always making your product one step better). This will persuade someone to eventually purchase from you if done correctly.
4) Information.
The most well known information site is Wikipedia. They produce most of their income from donations to the site. As you can see they do not sell advertisement space, and you do not have to pay in order to be a member. CNN on the other hand is the most well known news site, and they make their profit, whether it be from television or on the internet from advertisements. The key to truly having a successful information site, is to constantly update your site with good unique content. Also, you should strive to become one of the true authorities on your topic. This will naturally help you build back links to your site, which will provide you with higher rankings.
5) Persuasion.
Persuasive sites are usually pro-fur and political sites. The most well known of recent times being Barack Obama’s site. Again it may be hard to tell and measure success. One way to really be able to see how well your site is doing is to have a mailing list, or a similar interactive way to see if your site is paying dividends, and if you have the correct layout.
Measuring Success
I prefer to use Google Analytics however there are a few other tracking programs out there. It is also important to use Webmaster Tools. 3 things to track are: 1) Conversions, 2) Visitors, and the most important thing of all 3) Revenue. By closely following these 3 aspects, you can decide what adjustments need to be made, and if your previous adjustments have worked as you expected or if you should go back to your old ways.
If you take the amount of sales generated from a particular feature and divide it by the amount of submissions, or clicks you can tell how much each click was and is worth. Here is an example to see how important it is to track your conversions, and how it will directly influence your overall revenue.
If you receive 200 submissions on a contact form, and in return collect $12,000.00 in revenue, you would see that each submission is basically worth $60.00 ($12,000.00 / $200.00 = $60.00 )
Good luck everyone!
