Website ROI
Your website is an investment in your business and as such, you would want a return on that investment. We’ll look at website ROI in this article and why it is good business sense to invest time and money into your website.
First, let’s look at ROI (return on investment).
ROI (Return on Investment)
ROI is a comparison between how much you invest, the return on your investment and how much you gain on the investment.
Take the potential increase in sales and deduct the cost of the investment. This gives you the net gained.
Now, divide the net gain by how much you invested. This gives you the ROI (return on investment).
Choosing to Invest in Your Website
Take all the investments you want to make into your business (including investing in your website) with the projected ROI on each investment. Sort the list with the items with the most ROI at the top of the list.
While making your list keep in mind that fixing up or creating a website is a one time initial investment to improve sales while hiring a salesperson and/or buying link traffic will be reoccuring expenses.
Now don’t cheap out on the budget for the website. This is an important investment in your business and just as with everything else for your business, you want to make a good first impression to help land the sale. Focus on adding features and information that enhance the website, not just glitz and glamour, to improve the website ROI.
Your website is a 24/7 salesperson and has much more potential of attracting clients than a salesperson who you pay commisison or a salary to.
What Ruins Your Website ROI
Improved ROI can be accomplished by keeping things simple and making small changes in your website plan or your existing website.
Here’s a few things that can ruin your website ROI:
- Prioritize elements and features that give the best ROI. Don’t just focus on the visual elements of the website. You need information and features your target audience are looking for.
- Check your ego at the door. The website needs to be built for your target audience if you want it to make money for you. Just because you like something, doesn’t mean your target audience does. Show others what you have in mind and be open to the feedback.
- Just because your competitor is doing something, doesn’t mean you have to copy them. Be unique. Be different. That’s what people will remember.
- Don’t let your web designer’s ego take over. A good web designer will be more concerned about what works for your target audience than forcing what’s in at the moment.
- Be sure to be clear on what you want in your website design when asking for a quote. The more homework you do ahead of time, the better price you will get and the less chance for miscommunication between you and your web designer.
Areas That Improve Website ROI
There are some specific areas to look at to improve website ROI:
- Usability – if the website is easy to use then your visitors will be happy and recommend your business to others.
- Informative – providing all the information a potential customer needs to make the decision to buy can be the crux of making a sale.
- Know your audience – I know, this is the fourth time I have mentioned your target audience in this article. Are you getting the idea that researching and knowing your target is very important yet?
- Goals – know your goals for the website. To increase sales? Reduce staffing costs? Be a source of information for your clients?
How Do I Measure My Website ROI?
To measure the success of your investment you need to compare what the website is now doing for you with what the goals were when you started.
Are you getting the targeted traffic you set out to get?
Have your sales and/or leads increased?
Are you getting any feedback from visitors on what is working and what is not then taking the negative feedback and making the necessary changes?
When you look at your website stats, is the increase in website traffic converting to an increase in sales? More traffic isn’t any help if it’s not increasing your sales and/or leads.
If you have an ecommerce website, how’s your checkout rate? Are people completing the sale or abandoning the shopping cart?
Website ROI – It is Important
As you can see from the points above, taking a serious look at your new or existing website then making the required changes and tweaks to match target audience you are going after is a smart investment in your business. Listening to feedback from visitors, analyizing the website stats and sales stats then tweaking the website can only improve your website ROI.
Recommended Reading on Improving Website ROI
web design for ROI
Don’t Make Me Think
Why We Buy, “The Science of Shopping”.
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January 21st, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I’d say the most important thing you can use is provide the website users with good content. Second, a good navigation/organizational structure (which all tie into usability).
April 28th, 2009 at 2:26 am
I totally agree that good content is the most important factor in converting traffic to sales.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
its all about good content and unique content. this will definitely help you in the google rankings.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
The most important thing is to have good, unique content for your site. The other most important thing is proper navigation and it should be user friendly.
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:39 am
Excellently written article, if only all bloggers offered the same content as you, the internet would be a much better place. Please keep it up!
July 6th, 2009 at 5:21 am
I think in many organizations it’s quite difficult to quantify ROI, and specially if you want to know wich part it’s due to any UX improvement. But obviously with user’s research you got a lot of useful insights. Sometimes it’s demoralizing when you make very clear and simple recommendations for an enhanced end user experience and you see that nothing changes on that particular website.Thanks for the update!!
September 30th, 2009 at 11:37 am
A website is indeed a great investment. There are ways to increase the value of a website in terms of how many leads that website generates. One way to get more leads from ones website is by performing some basic marketing. I track my website leads gy using an 1-800 number so i know exactly how many people called and what they asked for.
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:19 am
Having a well indexed website can pay huge dividends. It is all about having decent content and know what you are doing with SEO. If you have those two elements done your website will be successful.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:08 am
I never have seen my website as you do (ROI), even as I try to earn money with it. Thank you for these good tips – I will consider them very well 🙂
October 6th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I really consider my website not only an investment but an important part of my wealth. I always advise people to take anywhere from 25%-50% of monthly profits and reinvestment them into their website in order continue to increase their earnings.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
There are many that have great content on their websites but then forget about optimizing their site so people can find it online. Your website should have a capturing system as well as information that keeps them coming back for more.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
I think you touch upon one of the most important things when working on a website. I help a few people on their sites and they always want it to look crazy “because they like it” whereas it is horrible looking/difficult to read or use. I always try to convince them that it is bad, but sometimes I never prevail.
Websites should be designed with the user in mind: not ads, not webmasters, and not search engines. These things are of second importance.
Also people are too willing to spend big bucks on a theme but neglect their content. Content is king and they should remember to invest in their content too.
Anyways, thanks for the great post and I will try to point some people to this for the great information.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
I would say, that was really a great article. Until I read this article, I never knew what ROI was. Thanks for sharing.
October 8th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
you made me aware about ROI thanks
October 17th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Usability is extremely important if you are selling something. With all the paranoia about cyber crimes people will suspect any website that doesnt look up to a certain quality so you need to make sure you have a great looking site that performs as it should.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:13 pm
I think you are correct. we have to humble ourselves and realize that we are in business to serve a customer. that means keeping your site simple and useful.
May 6th, 2010 at 1:37 am
While working on improving CTR and CPC a huge improvement on ROI can occur by working the landing pages themselves. If you can change conversion rates from say 4% to 6% you have improved ROI by 50%… as is repeatedly stated it is easier to improve conversions of existing visitors than get new ones…
Thanks for the post.
Amy 🙂
March 15th, 2011 at 5:28 am
Excellent article. (In fact excellent website you got here). Just a passing thought: if you wanted to improve this article, you could perhaps go into detail about which parts of the process tend to cost the most. In my mind it is the copy writing that is the most expensive. Done well it is the most important aspect, particularly when the Internet is ALL about niching.
April 26th, 2011 at 8:29 am
Website return on investment is one thing but a good way to improve your ROI is to improve your conversion rate. One of the best things I’ve done to increase my conversion rate and thus my ROI is to implement a product review section, also great product pictures will go a long ways towards increasing your ROI
June 3rd, 2011 at 5:44 am
For me, website ROI is a must as my focus is to make money online. Its not just a hobby where monetary return is not part of the equation.
I find that when I have an intentional plan and budget, I get results more often than if I don’t.
I also wait until certain things start to click before I will spend all my budgeted money as there is a case of throwing good money after bad as well.
And because there are so many approaches to take online, each person has to come up with their own recipe of what works and how to measure performance before monetary results kick in order to better determine where to invest incremental funds
December 9th, 2011 at 10:50 am
You’re right about checking your ego at the door – I always try to tell my clients (small biz owners) that they are not their customer and that their own preferences can have a detrimental effect on their bottom line.
December 26th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
The ROI of your website is certainly a key consideration. Many people forget to treat their website as their storefront – and operate it like a real business. And in any business, ROI is one of the primary things to be aware of.
February 10th, 2012 at 9:52 am
Too many people have been ‘trained’ to think of only traffic and search rankings. They do not adequately measure conversions and ratios to be able to see the actual ROI. The trick seems to be in spreading the word and making more people aware that the ROI of any marketing campaign is what matters the most. No matter how much traffic you get, if the conversions are not there, you are still failing miserably.
March 7th, 2012 at 12:49 pm
I think, you pretty much nailed it. You pointed out what’s *really* important when you start a new web project. The “Areas That Improve Website ROI” also show the most common mistakes – in my experince, often the goals are not clearly defined. And a big lack of knowledge concerning the audience is also very common. It’s important to realize that it’s not just important to get traffic, but also to profile the users as well as possible in order to optimize monetarization. In my opinion one of the key factor of website ROI.