Your website exists to make you money. Now, I must acknowledge that there are particular organizations that are not driving revenue through their web presence (schools, for example). However, for the vast majority of us, a website is a tool to generate an actual flow of revenue, as well as awareness for one’s brand and/or products. So I go back to my first point – your website exists to make you money.
As such, it is extremely useful to have a web analytics platform that monitors the activity of your website, from visitors to bounce rate and time on site. All of these metrics can give you an indication of how many people regularly see your products and how engaged they are with your website. This information translates (indirectly, of course) to your brand’s success. As I have discussed in previous posts, there is a lot of data to measure, and you want to be able to focus in on the most important information to your bottom line. This, I would argue, is data on website conversions.
Conversions exist in many forms – as actual transactions for an ecommerce site, or possibly as forms filled out by website visitors (see my last post on Micro and Macro Conversions). All conversions should be indicators for the amount of revenue that your website generates for your business. Obviously, with an ecommerce site processing the sale of particular goods or services, this value is fairly easy to derive; the price of the good/service would be the value of the conversion.
Even if your website does not have ecommerce functionality and is not directly selling anything online, there is still a strong case to be made for ascribing a dollar value to the conversions that do exist on your site. Let’s consider, for example, lead generation forms. Clearly, when a website visitor fills out and submits a form, they haven’t written you a check, but this does not mean that the lead has no value. Every business has some form of a sales funnel/cycle, and some percentage of the leads your business receives converts into real customers, who then actually give you money.
To calculate the value of your website conversion options, work backwards through your sales funnel. You can make this process as specific or general as you like (a more specific approach will take more time, but can reveal insights for different customer segments). It takes X number of leads to generate one client, and you make Y amount of dollars per client. Use this process to derive the value of one website conversion. Using web analytics, you should know how many conversions are completed, and therefore, you will also have a general idea of how much money your website has generated for your business.
How to use this Information
The examination of conversion data for your website can offer your business terrific insight as to the actual dollar value being generated by your web presence. Whether or not you actually set up a specific dollar value within your web analytics platform, it is good to understand the approximate value of each website conversion. As describe above, simply work backwards through the sales funnel to estimate these dollar values. To make this process more accurate, consider including fields in your CRM that specify the channels that leads come through and how they convert on your site.
This is not a one-step process, and must be refined and recalculated on an ongoing basis to remain accurate. However, the resulting knowledge is well worth the effort. As a full-service marketing agency, Webolutions® can offer insight on how to get this process started within your business. If you would like to learn more about how Webolutions® can help you with this or any other digital marketing questions, contact us online or give us a call at 720-746-2732.
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