Success Metrics

How much is your web site worth? How does it affect your business's bottom line? Does your web site succeed at the job you originally built it for?

Measuring Web Site Value

Most business owners and managers only have a vague idea of the answers to these questions. For every 100 development projects, only a few have clearly defined success metrics. Even more rare is the web site that actively measures its successes for attracting visitors and creating profits for it's owner.

E-commerce

For ecommerce sites, success is relatively easy to measure. Our e-commerce customers know exactly

• where their visitors come from
• how many new visitors they have
• how many become customers
• what the sales add to their bottom line.

All of these features are built in to our standard web store platform.

Measuring Web Site-Goals

For other customers we have a more difficult job in measure the success and value of the web site. For branding and brochure-ware sites a successful web interaction does not immediately create a transaction in the account system. To put a value on these sites' contributions, we need to have measurable site-goals. One example of a site-goals is a contact, such as a phone call or an email, from a new prospect. When we design sites at E7Systems we are always looking at these site-goals. In many cases, such as real estate, it is unreasonable to expect the site to close the deal all by itself. So we focus on intermediate site-goals such as subscriptions to email-newsletters, or click throughs on a banner ad.

Whatever the site-goal, we want to be able to measure it so that we can test how well the web site is doing it's job of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.

Business Process Improvement

Many of the sites we build are not strictly sales or promotion oriented. We often build sophisticated features into our sites which help ease the flow of information between a business and its customers. A web site can automate many time intensive and repetitive business functions:

• Customer support
• RFP's
• Product returns
• Newsletters
• Schedule calendars

An automated web based system for these tasks almost always does a better job for less money, reducing your overall cost of doing business. Likewise, the use of each of these features can be measured and optimized for maximum savings to our clients.

Branding and Image

While easy to see, it is nearly impossible to measure the value that you web site creates by improving your corporate image. An appropriate and professionally designed web site, well coordinated with your other marketing activities will have enormous benefits in the area of creating a corporate image or brand. These days the Internet is often the first resource when a prospect partner or vendor evaluates your company.

Putting it All Together

For all but the tiniest of businesses, the image & branding value alone is often worth the investment of building a web site. Perhaps this is why so many web sites are built without taking advantage of the other value opportunities discussed in this article.

At E7Systems we always discuss the full range of value creation opportunities available to our clients. After your site is launched we will want to work together to continually measure and improve your web site's performance in meeting it's site goals, contributing to your bottom line, and growing your business.

If you would like to see how your web site can create new value for your business, please contact us.