Measuring Success
When your site is up and running, you will want to know if it is working hard for you. But how will you measure success?
Most people set targets for their site. This could be the number of visitors, the ratio between visits to purchases, even perhaps the average number of page views per person or the time they spend on the site. Others will focus purely on the number of leads generated.
Whatever it is that you target, you will need some way of measuring this.
With key figures like number of visitors, page views and so forth you will need to use some tracking software. The good news is that there are lots of good free tools out there these days which simply weren't available in the same way in the past. One to check out would be google analytics that, once you've worked out how to use it, should prove useful.
Particularly interesting to monitor are the searches that people perform to reach your site. You can pick up some very useful information from this which can lead to the exploitation of markets that you never thought of at all when initially setting up the site.
On the other hand you may use this data to reveal that you're not hitting your target market - for instance if you're getting very little traffic for the key phrases then you can use the data to help you work out what might be wrong and see if you can improve performance - perhaps by slightly re-structuring or re-writing the site, improving page copy, adding new supporting pages and a whole host of other ways.
One thing is certain, there is a cornucopia of data available to you when you create a website, virtually everything can be measured in a way that's just not possible with most things in business. So make the most of this data and use it to your advantage - if used and monitored correctly it can be incredibly useful to the long term success of your business website.
Once you know how to measure success and have started measuring it, you might be interested in ways of building traffic to your site. If so, then take a look at free ways to generate site traffic or paid ways to get more visitors for various ideas.
This guide to building a business ecommerce site is by Clarity Media Ltd
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
