Why Bounce Rate is not a KPI…

When discussions around Bounce Rate began years ago and became popular, it was seen by many, including myself as a great gauge of how well landing pages were performing. Role on to 2009 when conversion is the key note on many brands agenda, how much does Bounce Rate really tell you about your landing page?

• “My bounce rate is low, the landing page must be doing really well”

Is it really? There are 2 sides of the coin. If you bounce rate is low and, say, your sales from that page or sign-ups are doing well (you’d need to define well) then it is probably safe to assume that your bounce rate being low is a good thing.

So how about a low bounce rate and not so good sales figures? Perhaps your bounce rate is low because when a user lands on the page, they have no idea about your product proposition and need to click various links to find out what whether your product is right for them.

What do you do about this?

First things first, how many page views do you have from that page? How much time was spent on the site from that page? A recent website I analysed had a fantastic bounce rate of 3% however had numerous 2 page visits lasting less than 10 seconds! Therefore whilst of a sample of 100, one could assume only 3 left without progressing further, tallying up the 2 page visits lasting less than 10 seconds showed that in fact the real bounce rate, based on this theory was closed to 40%. Eeek! Whilst we’re not concerned with actual numbers in this analysis, the key is that 40% paints a completely different picture to 3%.

The fact that the bounce rate is so much higher shows that this website has fantastic potential, because users are willing to try and find what they’re looking for, even though they did not see what they expected initially.

Matching intentions with relevant content


Analysing search terms that drove visitors to this website was a good start. Search terms help greatly to understand user intentions. If searching for “help with my ipod” this is easily different to “games for my ipod”. Based on this and grouping the types of intentions (information Vs product Vs whatever) you can tailor your landing page to delivering as much of what the customer wants as possible. You’ll rarely capture every single intention but a little effort could well help ensure the user gets what they want.

• “My bounce rate is high, my landing page is not working!”

Is this really true? Well you’d think so, based on the discussion above. What if your marketing department were working so hard on driving visitors to the website that, lets say, 1 in 4 that received the marketing material were not potential customers? Simply put, you might expect a 25% bounce rate from the landing page in question. Lets say another marketing piece is highly targetted with 100% potential visitors. In this instance, a 25% bounce rate is not so good…

What can you do about this?

First of all, understand the context of your landing page and it’s purpose. If the landing page is part of new guest acquisition marketing, then you may expect a higher bounce rate than a repeat customer landing page.

Secondly if you’re trying to get someone to buy from the landing page as opposed to sign-up for enews, ensure the proposition and journey is clear and relevant.

Traffic targetting

Here’s something else worth considering. If your bounce rate, on a really well-set landing page seems generally high, are you targetting the right traffic? If you sell Apple iPods and get traffic from people searching for Apple Macs then whilst your marketing might be driving lots of traffic, is it the right traffic?

The other side of bounce rates that many do not comprehend is that a higher bounce rate for a given page can be a good thing! If your landing page is optimally setup,then those that would have clicked further to find out more without understanding the proposition, will now leave your website and contribute to your bounce rate. Perfect for going back to your marketing team and asking them to work a little harder on targetting the right customer!

So why is Bounce Rate not a KPI? Because any KPI that needs context and further analysis to understand the result is not a Key Performance Indicator, it is simply a Performance Indicator.

Depesh

Controlling the mass of Tweets in Twitter!

Being new to using Twitter I’ve finally managed (as others have already done) to find a tool to aggregate Twitter feeds – TweetDeck! There are probably loads of similar tools out there but this seems the most popular with fellow Twitters!

Any other good ones out there?

I’m tweeting! Twitter’s growth and possible fall…

Twitter – what is it all about? I’ve been thinking that for the past year. Why waste time sending 140 words or less!

Actually its more of a social notification tool. A great way to receive up to the minute thoughts and opinions on anything out there!

http://search.twitter.com is probably the most useful part of it, since you can search for ‘real-time’ discussions.

If you wanted to search the news as it was written or recorded at a particular point in time, you could search ‘Obama Iraq’ in a search engine to see what was written.

Alternatively you can search Twitter and find out what is being discussed, RIGHT NOW. That’s right now as in your time, as you’re sitting there reading this, not my time, at the time I’m actually writing this. Great thing is the last post I just read is going to be different to the one you will see on the same topic. They are the latest in the long list of discussions (following his speech today on withdrawing from Iraq). A discussion is dynamic.

In summary, Twitter is fantastic for leveraging the here and now, what the online world is thinking or writing about any one thing. Can’t fit it into 140 characters? Not a problem, Twitter compresses long URLs into shorter ones to fit! Google sees the value of this…

For me the next big platform is how Twitter turns this profitable. A subscription service would no doubt alienate most users, advertising may annoy many but who knows? Is Twitter about to take on Google to some level? Google did, after all, make a bid on Twitter which was rejected. A wise decision? Perhaps. One thing is for sure, Google thinks it is important enough to spend time on! Is Google about to launch an app which is the same, but better? Will it try another takeover bid?

For all that’s great about Twitter, I think it needs a big injection of Google (that is, Google’s technology):

We’re sorry, but something went wrong.

We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly.

Sorry? You have probably 10m users and you’re sorry? A simple search repeatedly brought up this error, it is not the first. Twitter just cannot cope with the amount of traffic it generates. This is where Google really could add value. Many don’t think it is right for Google to monopolise, but for me, the simple Web user, I love Google! iGoogle, Google Maps (and mobile), Google Analytics, Trends, Web Optimiser – the list of useful apps Google provides is vast. Yes competition is healthy but if Google continues to provide such fantastic services whilst being arguably number one then I’m all for it!

Depesh

WordPress Multiple Tag Concatenation

Having used WordPress for over a year now I feel the time is right to share some tips I’ve found when creating pages, blog posts and mini-websites using WordPress . Some if not most are probably already being blogged but if not this may be of some use to you.

Combining Multiple WordPress Blog Tags for ‘Hybrid Pages’

I recently encountered the need to be able to segment my posts, to make them easier to categorise and hence link to allow visitors the ability to view relevant posts. Ever landed on a blog website and not known where to start when confronted by a long list of blog posts? Not very user friendly. Now if I create a post tagged ‘Customer Journey’ and another one called ‘Information Architecture’, someone visiting the website may want to filter out anything irrelevant aside from anything to do with ‘User Experience’ lets say.

There are a few options.

1. Let the user conduct a search (though we all know WordPress search is not the greatest…)

2. Add the tag ‘User Experience’ to your posts

3. Categorise your posts into ‘User Experience’

All 3 are viable options. However, with WordPress I discovered you can link to tags using

/tag/[TAG]

where the [TAG] is the single tag you wish to use; ensure you concatenate words using a hyphen e.g.

/tag/Customer-Experience

Will link to all posts tagged “Customer Experience”

However the smart guys at WordPress allow you to add 2 or more tags together e.g.

/tag/multi-channel+social-media/

which will search for all posts containing “multi channel” AND “Social Media”. Each tag is followed by the ‘+’ symbol. (currently nothing matches up!)

Finally if you wish to search for posts containing either keyword,

/tag/multi-channel,social-media/

hey presto, you’ve now searched all posts containing either tag using the comma as a separator. Clever? I think so…

The potential for this is three-fold

1. Improved Usability - you can of course categorise your posts, but with ever changing post topics and varying tags you may have the need for ’short term campaigns’ in terms of creating links to post categories to help users find information. Instead of changing categories you can simply choose which tags to point to. E.g. I’m blogging about holidays. As holidays are seasonal, I wish to now link to all beach holidays I’ve written about, in Europe that are ideal for families. Next month I wish to link to blogs related to winter holidays, in Europe ideal for families. Whilst categories would do the job (ensuring each and every post is categorised under ‘European Family Beach Holidays’ and ‘Winter European Family Holidays’ accordingly) it would be extremely time consuming should you wish to then also link to ‘Spanish Beach Holidays’ from your menu. Instead you can concatenate the tags and create links to all related posts.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – For SEO purposes, creating links is fantastic. You can use your keywords, which are called keywords as you expect this to be usable by your users. In the same way search engines will look upon your link text, link URL, title and body content quite favourably should you keywords match all the way down to content. Used as a menu link this signals to the search engine that you consider it important and so may your users….
3. Blog Fluidity - Static menus are always a must for usability when it comes to designing a website. Blogs are far from static so you do at times need ways to link to the most relevant posts at a higher level and this is where concatenating tags is extremely useful.

I’m sure there are other ways (e.g. using the ?tag= parameter) however in building strong, usable URLs I’ve found search engines and users alike get on well with this method!

There are some other enhancements I’ve made on other WordPress installations, such as displaying the tag query ‘meaningfully’ and creating specific page layouts depending on tags used and I’ll aim to blog these at some point…

Depesh

The InterWeb – Past, Present and Future

As I sit on this Virgin Pendolino train from Manchester to London a few random thoghts occur.

How amazing life is, with an entire ‘real life’ network of people, actions and thoughts. How could such a thing have simply evolved over time, without a more powerful existence to guide it.

Secondly, and unrelated, was how beautiful the British countryside really is and without the train journey I’d have probably never seen it.

yorkshire-countryside-uk

So this is a web log about the web so I thought of them in context to the InterWeb. For those that are not familiar with the distinction between Internet and Web, the Internet is the train and train track, the Web is a collection of all the destinations reachable via the train. The InterWeb therefore is my generalisation of both. Back to the topic…

The InterWeb as we know it, knew it and theorise it to become was not invented, in the same way as life as we know it was not. They
evolved over time. Such is the nature of our Universe that everything evolves, within the constraints of the environment.

However every now and again, just like the fish jumping out of the water, things need to evolve outside of its inherent constraints. Ask a cool sounding ‘Futurologist’ what the Interweb will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years down the line and you’ll hear lots of fanciful, some plausible thoughts including discussions on Web 3.0 (or the next big leap in web). However evolution cannot be mapped or guessed. At best we can guess but quite often we’ll be way off the mark. Just ask those born in the early 1900’s about the year 2000. It never happened that way… – but how could they have possibly known?
What did happen was technology. Technology has always existed. Who knew the power a transister would afford us, in the early days of its existence? No one did and know one thought to think about every possible application. Instead the technology acted as a catalyst to the evolution of computing into the device you’re reading this digital text from.

The future of the InterWeb is unknown. Will the train tracks change to allow us to take different journeys? Maybe new trains will enable new ways of working and thinking. Perhaps the entire structure of websites will change. Perhaps social media really is that catalyst for the evolution of web, maybe its the iPhone. What’s certain is that we as humans are full of endless possibilities. What limits us is the environment that we live in. We await the next catalyst to set off the next stage of online evolution – however I very much doubt anyone will be able to predict it.

In the meantime I reflect on this train journey and doubt, within the limitations of what I know and understand today, whether the experience of visualising the beautiful scenary can ever be replaced by anything digital, whether it be the next gen Google Maps or a new Virtual World gizmo…

What do you think this new online world looks like? Will we even get close to seeing the Matrix in real life? How much could we improve and globalise Second World? What’s the future looking like for Social Media?

Social Media & Customer Reviews – Subjective reasoning and what to do about it

Tripadvisor & Online Travel Agents (OTAs)

“Hotels.com will be integrating TripAdvisor hotel reviews on all of its 31 web sites across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The inclusion of the reviews is part of the brand’s mission to help its users choose the best property for their travel needs.”
http://www.hotelmarketing.com/index.php/content/article/hotelscom_includes_tripadvisor_reviews

Whilst Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are quick on the uptake, their philosophy into Social Media is pivoted around ensuring the customer receives the right accommodation based on their preferences. Travel agents are far more promiscuous in their promotion of individual hotels or holiday providers thus the TripAdvisor model suits OTAs better than it does the independent hotels.

Brands cannot hide from the Social Media space due to the global reach of TripAdvisor; embracing TripAdvisor within a brand’s e-commerce strategy has yet to prove itself across the sector to be beneficial; moreover brands are looking for ways to manage their online social status whilst maintaining their integrity. Ventures include Facebook ‘fan’ pages, YouTube video groups and bespoke social media solutions giving the brands a closed control on their online PR.

Brands

In communication with TripAdvisor, the following brands were cited as examples of successful TripAdvisor integration:
• http://www.kkhotels.com/en/hotels/london/k-k-hotel-george/traveller-reviews/#startposition
• http://www.libraryhotel.com/ (scroll down)
• http://www.novotelstkilda.com.au/explore.html

The latter 2 examples show the more moderate embracing of the Social Review stratosphere.

It seems for many, TA raises more questions due to the very diverse range of views expressed. The key to customer reviews is the personal nature of the reviews and the particular experience of the user.

A “25 to 34” year-old couple visiting Hotel X may describe the hotel as “being surrounded by rotting seaweed” and commenting “wish we had saved the money and gone to Resort X just down the road”  is in stark contrast to the same hotel regarding “some of the negative reviews on here”.  After booking his break and then checking TripAdvisor,  Mr Smith  (a fictional character) states “[I was] somewhat worried about what to expect but gladly, I was not disappointed”. On the “rotting seaweed” he commented “the area is not the best area in the bay but for what I paid for I was very much impressed! Oh – and I’m a usually miserable 38 yr old so take this as praise! ”

Would you visit Hotel X? I’m sure a vote on this would be split at best, most perhaps siding not to stay at Hotel X.

Mr Smith rated Hotel X at 5/5 whereas Mr Jones rated Hotel X at 2/5. Both had contrasting experiences.

Delving deeper, Mr Smith is a middle-class office worker who spent the weekend at Hotel X for the location and enjoyed the accessibility and comparitively cheap price.

Mr Jones however is a Financial Director of a large law firm and expects much more class from a hotel. He thought Hotel X was more a hostel than a hotel and will probably fire his PA for booking Hotel X! Does this now change your perception?

From past experiences and analysis into customer reviews it has become a dangerous haven for many brands. Whether you’re a hotelier, retailer or financial institution these facts are hard to avoid:

• Customers are more inclined to post a review when they’ve had a bad experience
• Customers are likely to post a review if they’ve had an exceptional experience
• Over 80% of online consumers trust, or use online reviews before making a purchase (apologies I do not have the reference at hand for that figure..)

If 2% of your customers have a bad experience, a further 2% have an exceptional experience and the remaining 96% had a good experience, how would this impact your brand? Would 80% of potential customers trust 2% of your actual customers meaning you lose business to a competitor? Food for thought…

To control or not to control…

The fear for brands with ‘uncontrolled’ customer reviews is the openness of interpretation. Without ‘some control’ on how the feedback is portrayed to the end-user, the branded website hosting 3rd party reviews such as TripAdvisor could well become a PR and Guest Liaison nightmare with more time spent negating the negative reviews. What Tripadvisor does extremely well is in leveraging social power to provide consumers with a great insight into destinations amongst other things. The damage this has on brands is that when you’re the owner of Hotel X, TripAdvisor to some extent doesn’t really care (at time of writing!) what the customer wrote as long as it is clean and honest. Now whilst the manager of Hotel X can go online and respond to comments, how many people will already have been put off, and will continue to be put off even if the Hotel X manager states that this is a one off..

Contextual Reviews

Tripadvisor are used as an example due to the fact that they are arguably the number on travel destination review website in the world! However this is by no means a dig at Tripadvisor. In fact Tripadvisor do currently attempt to provide context to reviews; whether this is enough I don’t know.

An alternative approach to a situation like this is to consider a bespoke solution, tailored towards your brand’s product, allowing categorisation of context for the review. How old is the reviewer? What was their expectation? How could their experienced have  been made better?By leading the customer you can ensure they cover as much of the good as the bad and allow the viewer to firstly make up their mind as to “whether this customer is like me”.

This can be placed against your brand’s own criteria for with some openness on who they’re targeted towards using subtle yet distinct copy. If your hotel is a budget hotel with a USP of  “the best budget view of the bay” then make sure customers see this when they see the reviews.

In summary the Internet world is ever-changing and sooner or later more and more brands will realise the potential business they’re losing out on by not embracing it. I can only hope brands start to realise that it is not really as scary as it sounds, with a little insight and know-how!

What do you think?

Use your customers to define your web strategy

So often I hear of web strategies taking a top-down approach from the business, trying to translate (a quite successful) traditional “offline” (that is, not online) strategy and developing this online.

“our customers do such and such, so the website needs to do such and such”

Consumers use websites in different ways. Individuals use the same website in different ways. They use different websites in different ways. Customers use call centre, bricks and mortar, online in different ways. If you walk past a shop and see some nice jeans in the window, what do you do first? Take a closer look? Check the design and picture yourself wearing them? Check the price tag?

What next? Walk into the shop? Walk away? Ok so you like them and you walk in. You see the sign post for ‘Men’ and find the ‘jeans’ section. You see the jeans that were on display and take a closer look. You like them, you find the correct size, you try them on, you buy them. Now imagine how you would do this online; you display an ad banner targetting men, 20-35, with images of jeans. The user clicks. They land on your website. But there aren’t any jeans on the homepage. So the user clicks the ‘Men’ link. They find the jeans section. They view the image of the jeans. They like them (that zoom-in and pan feature worked!). They select a size. The purchase them. Sound ideal? Well that was a highly idealistic journey comparison and research will find that it is just not that easy.

So my comparison with the shop window was an ad-banner. The ad-banner is competing with other ads just as a shop-window competes with other shops. Once they come closer, perhaps the shop-window is comparable with your website homepage? That’s where the comparison ends. Once you walk into the shop, in a matter of seconds you can pan around and get a good feel for the ambience of the shop, the type of people the shop attracts, the lighting used, the music played and of course, the types of garments on sale. All in the space of a few seconds. If the music is hard-core rock, what’s your interpretation of the shop? What if the music is classical? There are so many different touch-points in a bricks and mortar environment that cannot be reproduced online. Ok so your website has ambient music. I don’t browse with my sound on. Do you? Does your customer? So when they land on your website, do they know what kind people are attracted to your website/brand? Can the sense the quality? Do they feel they belong as they might by walking into a shop? Can they quickly scan the homepage like they might a shop and get a feel for what you have?

Using your customers

I’m an advocate of consumer feedback. It sounds so simple yet so many continue without it. Converse with your customer. Ask them why they’re here. What is their impression of your website? Do they understand your brand/website? Don’t second guess your customers! Your analytics package (you have one right?) will tell you what, but not why.

Part of setting a strategy is understanding why people come to your website. Understand why they are on your website and compare this with what they actually do. Spot the opportunities.

There are many ways to model this; find out why they’re here. Here are a few tools to get you going: http://4q.iperceptions.com/ and http://www.edigitalresearch.com/ – and get a good consultant to interpret the data.

Match this against your KPIs to determine how closely you really are serving your customers and to identify opportunities. Collect feedback. Read it, action it.

The bottom line is your website has a purpose

Your commercial website has a purpose. Your business has a goal. Your job is to meet business demand, online. Your business thinks they know what you need to do with your website, you’re a ‘techie’, you know this online stuff so you need to make it happen. What you need to do is to actually push this back to the business. Find out why people visit your website and action this insight. So you sell furniture. Your business wants to sell more online and reduce the call centre burden. Your boss wants you to make it happen. You create a website, with a shopping cart and product info, the perfect shopping portal! Your marketing team are doing great, 5k UVs/day in 3 months. Money is rolling in. Your share of business is 10% and things are looking good! A year on and you’re still at 10%. 18 months and nothing has changed. Revenue is up, as is the whole business but your share has remained constant. So what’s wrong? Your website is good, your marketing is good. But people are not buying online. Find out why! If you’re attracting a fairly constant stream of traffic to the website (and assuming they’re not ‘bouncing’) then they’re interested in your product, to some extent. Survey them!

Ok so survey’s are not 100% perfect due to their self-selecting nature but it will give you a good insight into what is really happening on your website. Perhaps most people visit your website because of that fancy new tool you developed to allow your visitors to plan their new living room? Perhaps they visit to view the products before calling to place their order? Perhaps there just is not enough information on your website to allow them to qualify their needs? What if 20% of those that visited intended to buy but only 2% of them convert on any given day? Potential? Is the data correct?

Your website strategy

Your website strategy will be made up of wide-ranging tactics, insights, plans and deliverables but if there is one thing for sure, involve your customers. Find out what purpose your website has for them. Don’t assume they’re going to fall into line and act as your business wants them to act. Getting your business demands and customer needs to meet 50:50 is a big task but with a little insight, you can make it happen
Depesh

Social Media

Social Media

Social Media is a fantastic buzzword. Just like “Web 2.0″, designed to make the “non-techies” scratch their heads . Granted however, most industry professionals have at least some idea what social media is.

The easiest approach is to break it down; social is the opposite of solitary. The social aspect by definition means more than one person’s involvement. But its far bigger than that. We’re talking communities of people quite possibly across multiple geographical and geopolitical boundaries. Furthermore it could cross religions in ways otherwise impossible, cross races and genders by their very nature of bringing together like minded people. The ’social’ in social media is the most fascinating part of it all. Possibilities are endless.

And what of the term ‘media’ in social media? The term merely implies a platform from which to enable the social element.

Here’s a great definition:

“In communication, media is the storage and transmission tools used to store and deliver information or data. It is often referred to as synonymous with mass media or news media, but may refer to a single medium used to communicate any data for any purpose.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media (communication)“

So its a means of storing and transmitting information. Combined with ’social’ the end result is a means to share information within a community, or allowing a community itself to share information with others.

And there countless platforms out there in cyberspace I’m sure I only need to name a few to help you out here: Facebook, Myspace, FlickR, Tripadvisor and Amazon.
Or perhaps you wouldn’t have classed Amazon or Tripadvisor under the social media banner? if not then consider the fact that Tripadvisor’s media model is based entirely on it’s ability to generate social interaction. And that a big part of Amazon’s success has been down to the ability to leverage the power of social reviews. Free marketing if you like… imagine that; customers selling your product because they have an opportunity to talk about it.

Social Reviews

There are huge risks in this. If 10 customers write glowing reports on your product and influence a number of people to buy, imagine what 10 negative reviews could do to your product? Even 5? In fact all it could take is 1 very negative review and those 10 positive reviews are completely ignored. This is a risk that many companies take due to the potential of social reviews. How do you mitigate this?

One simple way is to react in a positive way; “we’re sorry you had a bad experience with XYZ, we value your honest feedback and would like to discuss how we could better improve our products”. Social reviews then become a feedback mechanism for product research and improvement. Perhaps companies would rather that 1 person complain and raise some pertinent issues with their products than wonder why their product is failing so badly?

Social Experiences

What’s that about? A social experience could be your holiday snaps shared in FlickR, your holiday reviews left on Tripadvisor or how about your take on a company you used to work for or what you think about bunjee jumping? The world is becoming smaller; we’re in the information age where any world event is at the tip of our fingers and we’re all in some way capable of becoming world-reknown. Social media is an opportunity for everyone; but is the pie big enough for everyone? What happens to Facebook when the next big social media application hits the internet? Is Myspace in real decline or has the market just become a bigger place? Are too many companies launching their own social media applications and soon we as consumers will have too many logins and passwords to care whether someone knows what you’re doing at any one time or whether you’ve managed to upload that home movie clip to Youtube or Vimeo.

The future of social media is an interesting one…

Quality of traffic and online conversion

One of the key challenges we all face is integrating conversion analysis across the entire customer journey. This is from acquisition which occurs outside of the website, sending traffic to the website which as a conversion owner, you need to understand.

Tools such as Double Click, Omniture and Webtrends try to go some way to bridge the gap, but all the data in the world won’t tell you anything until you start understanding how to interpret the data.

Conversion begins from the moment your target customer engages with you, whether through online or offline. Once they’re interest in your product increases (i.e. a click or other action) you need to ensure you’re tracking them at each step of the way and you’re marketing to them in the right way. If your company is all about value, then tell them how much they’re getting. If your company is about trends or fashion, make them feel they can identify with your brand.

However conversely don’t think that the more visitors you get the higher the conversion! MISTAKE!

The best converting websites optimise their traffic before it hits the website to ensure you’re receiving quality traffic. There will always be a large majority that are only browsing or are discovering your brand, or have accidentally landed on your site, but your goal is to ensure you maximise your exposure to the maximum relevant people. Only by this will your on site conversion really come to pass.

Depesh

Driving up the value of your eCommerce website

How do you measure the ‘value’ of an eCommerce website

Our conversion consultant recently conducted a study on the value of our eCommerce website. Considering visitors are up, conversion is down and YOY revenue is also down, this potentially paints a bleak outlook. So what has happened? Due to the newly aligned multi-channel approach adopted, the website is now required to be as much a lead generator as it is a booking channel. The web is not a sales tool, but a tool for the customer to use during the path-to-purchase. An online brochure.

So what does that mean? Focusing on what is best for your customer. This means giving the customer an option to book online or through the call centre. This means giving the customer full access to as much information as they need and to deliver the best brand experience through the website. Offer the customer the opportunity to subscribe to enews, request a brochure and to call. If that’s what they want to do…

So with this in mind, how do you measure the value of your website? I mean, in monetary terms. After all, investing money into your eCommerce website requires a commercial understanding of the ROI. So what is the ROI of a website which is no longer delivering as many sales? Is the website not performing due to sales and conversion tracking down YOY?

Measuring the value of your eCommerce website

Okay so you know the value of your online purchase. For the sake of arguement, your average order value is £100 (that’s GBP!). If you receive on average 50 orders a day, you make £5,000 a day. Great! But you’re down on last year’s average orders a day by 50%. Last year you took 100 orders a day and brought in £10,000 a day. So what’s gone wrong? Well what happened is that you now employ a multi-channel approach and have helped transfer business to your other channels (bricks and mortar shop, call centre…) by changing your online strategy to accommodate the customer’s need.

Whilst orders are down, you notice that the number of sales calls generated from the website are up from 10 a day to 100 a day. You also notice that more people are requesting catalogues. From 20 catalogues a day, you’re now shifting 200. Ok so what? Let’s say your web calls convert at 10% and you generate 10% sales from the brochure.

Therefore you can model the following:

100 calls converting at 40% = 40 bookings a day

200 catalog requests converting at 10% = 20 bookings a day

Those 60 extra bookings at an average value of £100 adds a potential £6,000 totaling revenue generated from the website at £11,000 – that’s £1,000 up on our fictional YOY comparison!
So you see, in order to evaluate the success of your eCommerce website, look further than the direct revenue generated and delve into the indirect revenue for the business

Depesh