06.09.21 | Tagged as: Insight
Cost is always at the forefront of your mind when it comes to a new website, but it’s always worth remembering that websites are an investment.
You don’t simply have a website for the sake of having one.
If you do, then it’s time to change your mindset because websites make money, FACT.
We should and can always calculate the ROI on a website.
Here at WeCreate, before any work takes place, we will always ask you how you will deem your website a success?
It could be some, or all of the following:
Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail.
Increasing traffic to your site is always a smart move.
Ideally you’ll want this to be organic / free traffic but there are paid avenues as well.
Whilst increased traffic is great we also need to make sure that the quality of that traffic is high.
You can assign a monetary value to each visitor to your site.
If we say each visitor is worth £10, and your site cost £5k then you’ll want 500 visitors to cover the cost.
Once you have someone on your site then ideally you want them to get in contact with you.
If you have some data capture forms and someone fills one of these out then you can assign a value to this.
This value will be significantly higher than just traffic, because now you have a ‘hot lead’ on your hands.
Let’s say someone filling out a form is worth £100.
Again if we have a 5k site, then we need 50 visitors to fill out a form.
The conversion of this visitor into a loyal, paying customer is now down to your internal processes.
The easiest websites to calculate a ROI on will be ecommerce stores selling physical or digital products.
If we say you spend £5k on a website and the average price of a product is worth £50, then you need to sell 100 products to make your money back.
The good news is that all of these things are incredibly easy to track with a little know how.
By installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console on your site you can easily track your traffic.
These are both free to sign up for and require a little snippet of code to be added to your site, as well as a verification process to ensure you own the website.
Google provides you with a wealth of information and the data can be quite overwhelming, however it’s very simple just to look at your traffic / visitor numbers.
To make life even simpler, we can give you access to your analytics data through your CMS (Content Management System) rather then having to log into Google each time.
When someone fills out a form on your website, you will get an email.
You can keep count of those manually, or better still, we can also store the form submissions within your CMS.
Not only does that help with tracking enquiries but it also gives you peace of mind that if your email isn’t working for whatever reason, the data is still available to you through your CMS.
With phone calls, this is something you will have to manually track.
Remember, whenever someone calls, you always want to ask them whether they have been to your website or not?
Here at WeCreate we love WooCommerce.
It’s the perfect solution for an online store and is highly scalable, so whether you have a small one person operation or a huge online store, WooCommerce is fantastic.
Tracking your sales is easy with WooCommerce.
It has many filters, so you can look at yearly sales, monthly sales, todays sales, individual customer sales etc.
Even if you don’t work with us, always make sure you know how you will calculate your ROI.
If the agency or developer that you are working with doesn’t speak with you about this at the very beginning of the project, then alarm bells should be ringing.
If you don’t know what these are, it’s a method to put an advert for your business in front of an audience for certain search terms in Google.
If the ad is then clicked on, it costs you some money.
We get a lot of calls from businesses who spend money on Google Ads but literally have no idea whether that money is generating them business.
Now you know that the information is so readily and easily available, through Google Analytics and Google Search Console, please don’t be fobbed off.
Ask to see your traffic numbers, how your websites ranking have increased and even ask for access to all your Google Analytics and Google Console accounts.
They are an excellent way to get eyes on your business, but you MUST have the data to justify the spend.
