How can you tell whether a web site is a success or failure? Trick question! If it is someone else's web site, you do not know what their true objectives are so you cannot even begin to measure their results. Luckily, you have read my recent columns and you have determined your own objectives for your own web site. Let's see how you will measure your success (failures are not allowed).

It's the final count that counts.

Is your main objective to complete sales online? You will need to monitor total sales dollars and number of orders. State your objective in terms of the sales revenue you desire. For example, you may want $5000/month sales. If you immediately get orders for $5000/month, that's great. Send me a postcard from Bermuda.

If your sales do not measure up to your objective, calculate your average sale per order. For example, if you took ten orders last month, worth $1500 in total, your average sale was $150. In order to meet your objective at that rate, you will need to make about 34 sales per month. You have two choices.

First, you could try to boost your average sale to $500, perhaps by cross-selling or up-selling. These are advanced marketing concepts that usually require very expensive modifications to your web site. Not a good choice on a limited budget.

There is a better choice. Examine your web site activity logs. Use the log analyzer software mentioned in my August column. What do you look for?

Most visitors reach your web site via the main page. Look up the visitor count for that page. For example, let's say it is 1000 (for the last month). This means that 1000 people entered your web site.

Now look at the count for the main catalog page. For example, say it was 200. This means only 200 people out of those 1000 bothered to go into your store (20%). You already know that only ten of those 200 people bought anything (5%).

Here's a possible plan. One out of twenty people that visit your online store make a purchase. Your objective is 34 sales per month, so you need to get 680 people into your store in hopes that the same percentage of visitors will turn into clients. You already have 1000 visitors making it to your web site, so you could focus your attention on getting 680 of them into the store. Or, you need to increase traffic to your site from 1000 to 3400 per month.

Examine the traffic patterns within your site. Look at the "dwell-time" for each page (the total time that a visitor spends on each page). You may need to add (or modify) content on low dwell-time pages. Perhaps you need better navigational aids. The very structure of your web site may need to be optimized to channel visitors from your main page into your store. Getting a much higher percentage of your visitors into your store may require a major web site overhaul and some expensive help from a marketing consultant.

Faced with a more realistic budget, it may be easier to increase traffic to your site using any of the methods we have reviewed in previous columns.

Your objective may not be to make sales online. Did you want photobuyers to contact you personally? Are you looking for assignments? No matter. Specify your objectives using numbers, as in the above example. Follow through the same way. Determine what numbers need boosting and how you can boost them. If you have choices, look for the ones you can afford that are cost-effective. Handle your secondary objectives the same way.

Are we done yet?

Yeah, I know. I don't like marketing that much either, but you can't succeed without it. Next month I will finish this series by examining the general issue of web site cost-effectiveness.

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Latest Revision: Saturday, 07 May 2005 08:52 AM