Measuring and understanding your website's success is a critical process that is sometimes overlooked. Many times, marketing efforts stop at getting traffic to the site. The next step is to evaluate results.
By "connecting the dots" between your marketing programs and end results, you can improve performance. Ultimately, site success depends on how well your site performs with respect to your goals. Measuring actual results against those goals tells you how well your site is succeeding.
Improving results means not only measuring the results themselves but also measuring, understanding, and adjusting the events that lead to those results. Further, having a marketing plan that identifies general strategies and specific programs for meeting your site goals will give you a higher baseline performance to work with when improving upon your site's success.
Have a Plan
Whatever your website goals, a marketing plan helps you meet them. By including two or three general strategies to meet each goal as well as specific programs under each strategy, you are better able to evaluate and improve performance.
For example, let's say you make high quality, custom-made scarves and wish to sell them regionally:
-- A website goal could be to begin selling scarves online and achieve "x" amount of sales in the first six months online.
-- One general strategy for meeting that goal could be to get the site known locally by fashion conscious ladies in your community.
-- A specific program to support this strategy could be to hold a contest on your site, with the prize being a free, customized scarf. To promote the contest, you could issue a press release, which you send to fashion editors, etc.
By taking this funneled approach - planning down from the broad goal to the specific marketing program - you are better able to evaluate how well each program supports (or fails to support) your goals.
From the start - when you are developing your plan and deciding site structure - think about how to measure performance. Measures will differ, depending upon the situation, but should be both quantitative and meaningful with respect to helping you improve site performance. Choose a set of measurements that will tell you not only how your marketing programs are working, but also how well they support website goals.
Evaluate marketing Programs
To evaluate a marketing program's success, decide your objectives first. You can then "connect the dots" between those objectives and your site goals. Later, when analyzing program results, evaluate not only whether the program succeeded in meeting objectives, but also how well it moved your Business t
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