How To Evaluate Your Web Sites Performance

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your web site goals.

If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your web site is functioning at peak efficiency.

One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities. However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful.

Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your web site.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for.

For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take the number of visitors who made a purchase and divide that figure by the total number of web site visitors. Then multiply that result by 100 (25 % 2000 X 100).

If your web site is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer.

However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your web site whenever you make changes to the site. You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low.

There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your web site, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier.

You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your web site to accomplish the action the site is set-up to do.

For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site.

Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible. Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your web site. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form.

Web site copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

Nancy P Redford shows you how to Take Online Payments for any web site without a costly merchant account. Stay safe on the Internet by getting wise to Online Scams and Shams. Plus get some of the best business tools and resources for your home-based business here at: http://www.miriadz.com

Web Development Company CEO elected to NJRCC Board of Directors TransWorldNews (press release) Founder, president and CEO of Web Development Company Hudson Horizons, Daryl H. Bryant, was recently elected onto the Board of Directors for the North ...

Mashable's Weekly Guide to Social Media & Web Development Jobs Mashable (blog) But we'd like to help in a more direct way, too. Mashable's job boards are a place for socially-savvy companies to find people like you. ... and more »

topseos.in Recognizes the Best Indian Web Development Firms for November 2009 Online PR News (press release) Online PR News – 18-November-2009 – Plymouth, IN- The Best Indian Web Development Firms have been chosen by topsoes.in for this month. ... and more »

3D Web development critical to HPC growth EE Times India The 3D Web development is critical to the growth oh high performance computing. "Nothing is more important to the long term health of the HPC industry than ...

Twitlicious - Republican/Democrat conceit, joining the Trump Network and ... MarketWatch Quick note to start - I need some interns for web development, stock mkt research and other stuff. No pay to start, but foot in the door. ...

appendTo Releases Industry-Leading Support, Training Solution to the jQuery ... PR Web (press release) “Corporate IT teams and web development professionals are increasingly seeing the value of using jQuery's sustainable, open source JavaScript library for ... and more »

ASP Web Development Team Leader ashdowngroup.com This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced Classic ASP Developer to take a Team Leader / Project Manager position within this leading online ...

Advaiya, Inc., Announces Cutting-Edge Microsoft SharePoint and Silverlight Web ... PR Newswire (press release) KIRKLAND, Wash., Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Sandy Sharma, CEO of Advaiya, Inc., a leader in new technology and Web site development, today announced Advaiya's ... and more »

Web Development Innovation Set To Disrupt Matters Scoop.co.nz (press release) The days of spending thousands of dollars on web development fees for small to medium sized businesses are over, that's according to Andrew Hendrie, ...

Getting Twitter storms in perspective guardian.co.uk Joanna Geary, web development editor for The Times and one of the most thoughtful of journalistic bloggers, has an interesting take on Twitter storm ...