Measuring success at an e-commerce site is easy: what did you sell? You can tally the number of sales, the amount sold per transaction, the conversion rate, and all the other numbers online sales provide. You can see the actual income, calculate the profit, and compare the net to the cost of the campaign.
If you’re not selling anything, though, it can be harder to determine your conversion rate or your return on investment.
I’m writing a professional speakers’ website and brochure right now for Kansas design firm Titus D. The brochure will have the address of the new website as well as a phone number, and the website will also have the phone number. Aside from just noticing how many more calls she gets once we have her new materials ready, how can the site owner tell what kinds of results she’s getting.
- Have a contact form to fill out at the website. With a form to fill out, you can count the number of responses you receive; with “thank you” pages, you can track responses as goals in your analytics. With multiple “thank you” pages for different kinds of actions, you can segment the responses and get a lot of data.
- Sell or give away something on the website. If the speaker has a white page to download or an e-book to sell, classes to register for or a newsletter to subscribe to, you can track responses for those items.
- Track phone calls. If, as in this case, a phone call is the preferred conversion, then it makes sense to track those calls so you know which came from the website and which from the brochure (at minimum). Use call tracking software or assign specific phone numbers to each marketing channel.
Any of these methods gives you a metric to track so you can see the improvements over time.
Leave a Reply