Your Business Website What Should You Be Monitoring

Writen by David Malan

With so much happening on a daily basis, it's sometimes difficult to know what are the important things to keep an eye on when managing your business website. Here are a few pointers regarding some of the more important aspects of monitoring and measuring your business website's performance.

Monetary Performance

How you define your website's monetary performance, as well as how you measure it, is going to differ from business to business, but there are two specific aspects that most businesses will agree are fundamental:

1. How much money you are spending on developing, promoting, maintaining and managing your website.

2. How much money you are making from your website.

It sounds simple enough, but it's not really as cut and dry as you might think. Most business websites have a marketing value attached to them that is difficult to quantify. For example, how do you measure how much money you made from people who found you on the internet, then subsequently phoned you to make contact, or walked in your shop door?

As far as is possible, keep accurate records of all money flow attributable to your online presence. Record the costs of development, maintenance and promotion of your website. Record online sales in such a way that you can calculate the cost per order. Ask your new customers how they found out about you, then keep track of their subsequent spend with you. This applies not only to your first sale. If you acquire one long-term big-spend customer, that alone can very often pay for a good deal of your online costs.

If you have substantial online sales, make sure that you are able to account for these sales separately from your offline sales. If you run online promotions, ensure that you include a tracking mechanism that will allow you to determine where your sale was originally derived - that way you will be able to revisit profitable online promotion opportunities and avoid those that produce little value.

Marketing Performance

As alluded to above, your website generates more than just the direct revenue associated with immediate purchases. Your business website serves another important function -- that of marketing your business to the world at large in a way that you would find impossible to do yourself.

There are many many ways you can track the marketing performance of your website, but the most important thing is to keep accurate records and compare them month-on-month, then learn from them and keep improving your website accordingly. Here are a few suggestions to maximize the marketing benefit of your website:

1. Update your site regularly with updated information about your business, your services, and the value you provide.

2. Start a newsletter to keep in regular and direct contact with your existing and prospective customers

3. Provide online feedback facilities to allow customers to contact you with positive and negative feedback, as well as sales leads.

4. Provide online customer service tools such as online message box facilities to speedily assist customers

5. Update your site regularly with press releases and other newsworthy content.

6. Provide articles online to assist your prospective customers with information related to your products and services. You are, after all, an expert in your field, and this is a great way to share your knowledge and showcase your value to prospective customers.

7. Utilize traffic monitoring tools to monitor traffic to your site. A good software package should provide detailed statistics of your visitors, number of pages viewed, from which country they are coming, and so forth. Make sure you keep a detailed history of this information, it can be a great way to track the growth of your site over time, and there's nothing better than seeing a graphic representation of that growth.

8. Provide online survey tools. This is a great way to research your market, especially if you have a number of your clients subscribed to your newsletter. A simple link in the newsletter to your online survey can quickly provide targeted research results in record time. What better way to learn about your market than to ask them directly for feedback? Make sure that the results are stored in a database for subsequent analysis.

There's a lot to managing your online business presence, it is after all simply an online representation of the rest of your business. By focusing on the direct and indirect benefits, monitoring and measuring them, you are sure to keep improving the performance of your entire business.

David Malan is an internet and e-commerce expert with over ten years experience in designing and developing enterprise grade online solutions for business.

He owns and runs RealmSurfer Consulting, based in Perth, Western Australia.

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