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Internet ROI |
How to make Profit and get Return - on - Investment from the Internet |
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Getting Better Results from your Website
Understanding how your website design contributes to your profit is a key step to getting the best possible return on your company’s investment, or roi in the Internet. As with any investment such as chess software in chess set retailing it is crucial that you monitor the various factors which contribute to the success of the venture to ensure the venture is accomplishing your goals. These success factors need to be defined by performance indicators that can be measured, such as actual versus projected sales per month. Your should monitor such key performance criteria throughout your website's lifetime. The temporary insanity of the 2000-2002 Dot Com frenzy led many to believe that the Internet was different, that performance indicators such as the actual profit did not matter, all that mattered through such things as search engine optimisation was the potential for infinite growth. This led many to place their faith in arbitrary measurements, such as the number of hits that their website achieved and how many people registered on the site, over fundamental business metrics leading to many business finance efforts through agencies designed to help struggling companies.
The key message arising is that you need to choose the metrics by which you measure your website’s performance carefully, and that these metrics should be closely aligned with the performance indicators of your business model and strategy. After all, the purpose of your website is to bring return on investment (roi), or support and expand your business. Ultimately, the value of the measurement process directly relates to how much your business performance benefits from the results.
If your measurement does not produce results that enable you to act strategically, you will not get substantial returns. Many webmasters do not fully understand which performance criteria should be measured on their website, or how to go about obtaining this information. Here are the factors required to start you down the track to ensuring the long-term success of your website in supporting its goals and strategies.
Analysis is the key. Companies exist to provide the metrics needed from a site to aid towards ROI. But most hosting companies provide tools free with the hosting charge to give a significant insight into the following metrics:
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Site Usage
- Conversion rate of visitors to sales
- Numbers of visitors and sessions
- Customer and Visitor Acquisition
- How people are using the site
- How many people repeatedly visit the site
- Time between repeat visits
- Geographic information
- Search Engine Activity
- Which websites are sending visitors to your site
- The search terms people used to find your site
- How your site is positioned in search engines
- How many people place bookmarks to the site
- Top pages where people entered your site
- Most popular pages
- Top pages for single page view sessions
- Top pages where people exited your site
- Top paths through the site
- Effectiveness of key content
- Did your visitors encounter errors (broken pages, server errors...)
- Did you loose visitors because of these?
Costs
How Visitors Arrived at the site
Site Content Analysis
Quality Assurance
“If your measurement does not produce results that enable you to act strategically, you will not get substantial returns.”
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21st Century R-O-I.
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