What Is Return On Investment For A website, Anyway?

In our last issue, we discussed the importance of measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) for a small business website. If you aren't measuring this, you don't know if the website has any value to your business.

But what defines ROI for a website? Measuring ROI for many financial investments is straightforward: if a bond pays $1.05 on every $1.00 invested, the ROI is obvious. With a website, however, the "return" is much murkier. Are people seeing your message? Is the message compelling enough to keep these people on your site?

There are a number of ways of measuring these parameters. By doing so, and by tracking these measures over time, you can get real information about your website. Some of the most important are:

Stickiness - How long are people staying on your website each time they visit? The longer someone visits, the better. This means they are spending time carefully gathering more information about your business and what it can do for the visitor.

New visits - How many of the visits are people who have never visited the website before? Carefully measuring this is very important because these people are first time visitors. Your business has made contact with a new person and has an opportunity to develop a relationship with a new potential customer.

Bounce rate - What percentage of visitors exit the website from the very first page they land on? If this number is high, the website is performing poorly. If the visitor is not bothering to click to any other pages, the website made a bad first impression.

Compelling Marketing Communications and Talcott Mountain Media will be discussing more about website improvements in our next issue, which comes out the third Tuesday of every month. We'll see you on September 15th.

Compelling Marketing Communications is here to help you.

If you would like more information about how Compelling Marketing Communications may be able to help your business prosper call (860) 604-5573 or email Bill@CompellingMarketingCommunications.com.