Joseph Sless | 16 Apr 2008

Since your website was first put together, how do you know what benefits it has delivered to your business? There are a number of ways to measure your website’s impact and monitor its success over time.

Most companies setup a website to form part of their overall marketing strategy and to help promote their brand. They are looking for a steady flow of traffic to the site and some level of tangible benefits – sales, enquiries or other visible results.

The traffic statistics available from your web host are very useful in understanding how successful your website is - what keywords people are searching for to find you, how long they spend on your site and what content they look at. This will help you to monitor the site’s impact as a promotion and PR tool.

You should also keep a record of enquiries, subscriptions and sales leads received through the website. This can either be done manually or by linking it into any database system that you use to manage other areas of your business.

The information you collect in this way will allow you to analyse the amount and frequency of contact your website delivers, discover how changes to the site affect its results, when busy periods are and what types of sales it generates. It will also help you to measure the website’s return on investment, comparing its direct or indirect revenue with the cost of setting up and maintaining it.

Finally, a website is not just about people buying your product or filling in an online form to get in touch. It should be there to present a positive image for your company and back up the message you deliver in all other areas of your sales and marketing. This impact is much more difficult to measure, but you should try to gauge the opinion of your customers, colleagues and suppliers and develop the website to ensure it delivers the message you want it to.

A lot of time and effort can go into the production and maintenance of a website, so you should do what you can to ensure those resources are delivering tangible results.

Eden Light work with growing businesses to help them make the most of their website within their marketing strategies. To find out how we can help you achieve better results give us a call on 08702 407 507.

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