There's no doubt that any business operating a website wants it to be a success. After all, a successful site can drive more business, retain customers and save money. But when we talk about 'success', what do we really mean? The look and feel of the design? The architecture and technical performance? Or perhaps the user experience?
What’s your website done for you lately?
General consensus is that a successful website needs to meet key business objectives, including:
- Is it delivering a high return on investment (ROI)?
- Is it reaching the people you need to reach?
- Is it sustaining relationships across the sales cycle?
- Is it converting browsers to buyers?
- Is it delivering repeat purchases?
While some site owners are able to answer these questions easily, many can’t with any real level of certainty due to a lack of time, money or knowledge.
What if...?
The problem with these measurements is that they can’t tell you whether there’s a better way to get results; such as changing just one part of your site. Or whether a specific communications channel might convert business ten times more effectively than another.
As a result, site owners spend time and money trying to get more people to visit their site whereas they could produce better results by simply changing what visitors see and are guided to do when they arrive.
However, there are methods available which help you review the effectiveness of your website and make informed changes to increase overall success.
Introducing…the three steps
So, now we’ve looked at the limitations of a more traditional approach, here are three simple steps to get you on your way:
1. Understand what’s happening across your site right now (analytics)
2. Plan where you’re going and how you’ll know when you get there (KPIs)
3. Test different options in real-time (optimisation)
Step one – what’s really going on?
Website analytics products will allow you to get a comprehensive overview of what is actually happening on your website.
It is important that those in charge of analytics are directly connected to the strategic marketing objectives of the organisation to ensure that opportunities don’t get missed and that strategic direction is based on actual insights.
In today’s world, with things moving at lightening speed, anything that slows down your ability to deal with changing circumstances effectively can’t be good for business.
Step two – where are you going?
Unless you know where you’re going, you can’t begin to work out how to get there. More importantly, it’ll be difficult for you to ever work out whether you’ve arrived.
Firstly, you need to have objectives; what are you looking to achieve (what does success look like)? Increase sales? Lower costs? Better engagement? It could be a number of things but to do it right, the key is to be as explicit and focussed as you can.
Secondly, work out your aims and produce achievable goals. This means reviewing what you’re going to measure and knowing the value of each element. These will turn into your KPIs and will form the backbone of your measurement activity.
For KPIs to be useful, they must be meaningful:
1. They should be clearly linked to what matters to the business
2. Wherever possible, they should be benchmarked against industry standards
3. They should be SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time sensitive
4. They should have sufficient budget and resource
5. They should be reviewed regularly and adjusted where necessary
Lastly, no site or campaign is static. Having a real-time view of how everything is performing will give you a clear picture of where you need to place more emphasis.
Step three – testing success
How do you know when a page is working? One way is to see whether it is hitting or exceeding its KPIs. But how do you know whether there could be an even better way of achieving the results you want?
The answer lies in testing (a good place to start if you have not done this yet is A/B testing). This involves creating multiple pages (each have relatively minor differences) and randomly serving them to visitors. Each page’s performance is then assessed and the most effective page is kept as the core page for future use – a form of survival of the fittest.
Without testing, you won’t really know what to change and will never know the full potential of your site. Ultimately, it’s about continuously improvingyour site to deliver the best results possible.
Bringing it all together
Every website is different. However, what they do have in common is the need to generate value for the business as a whole.
For your site to be successful (and effective), you need to be clear about what success looks like for you. Beyond this, you need ways to track and measure that success over time – ways that give you the information you need in real-time. Finally, you must be able to quickly and easily test alternatives that could offer even better results!
Maria Wasing
Head of European Marketing and Investor Relations, EPiServer