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Evaulating Web Site Performance
By Anita van Wyk, Sat Dec 10th
Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internetmarketing campaign, and the success or failure of your sitedepends greatly on how specifically you have defined yourwebsite goals. If you don't know what you want your site toaccomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring yourwebsite, all your site will be is an online announcement thatyou are in business. If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action,whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representativecan contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps youcan take to insure that your website is functioning at peakefficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site isworking for you is finding out the number of visitors in a givenperiod of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in whichyou haven't been doing any unusual offline promotionalactivities. However, just because hoards of people have passed through yourgates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you wantthose visitors to actually do something there. It is equallyimportant to monitor the number of visitors to your site whomade 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 visitorsper month and figure out the percentage of them that actuallyperformed the action your site is set up for. For example, ifyou had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchasedyour product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To getthis figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figureby the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide thatresult by 100 (25 ?00 X 100). 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 yoursite conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This isbecause not everyone who fills out your form will actuallybecome your customer. However, whether your site is set-up tosell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill
out aform, the site conversion rate will measure the success orfailure of your website whenever you make changes to the site. You may find that you need to implement some additionalmarketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site isextremely low. There are several effective methods to improvethe flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching asearch engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targetedat increasing your position in search engine results so thatconsumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can eitherresearch the steps you need to take to improve your searchengine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization companyto do the work for you. In either case, after your have improvedyour search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of themby regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintainhigh positions. Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor toyour 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 gothrough four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to getto, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on toanother site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and thepath 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 purchaseor fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically gearedto your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job fromyour company brochure. The right copy can make the differencebetween profit and loss in your online campaign. This article may be freely reprinted as long as all links andauthor information remain.
About the author:** http://www.small-biz-web-solution.com offers an affordable web-hosting,web-building and web-marketing solution for any small business/individual. Free Trial available. ** For a FREE 6 Day e-course on How to Improve your SearchEngine Ranking and Tips on how to get much more Traffic pleasesend a blank email to searchengineandtraffictips@getresponse.com
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