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The biggest problem that most businesses have with their website is that there is no measurable “Goal”. It “exists” but there is nothing that it “does”.

If you can’t measure the effectiveness of a website, that means that it probably isn’t doing anything positive for your business and if that’s the case, you should scrap it and start over. There is no rule that says every business to have a website.

I have come across A LOT of businesses that don’t have company websites and are extremely successful. A lot of times, I’ll see companies who only create websites to generate leads but it doesn’t have anything about that specific company. Those websites are 1000x times more successful to that business than a highly-priced, great looking website would ever be.

The Worst Type of Websites - Brochureware

Websites that utilize any of the interactive power of the Internet and are just digital versions of brochures are some of the worst websites that a business could have. The problem with them is that there is no specific goal in mind. The site could have hundreds of people visiting the site each day but if there is not some way to monetize the value of all those visitors, the site is not doing anything to help the business.

Different Type of Website Goals

Depending on what type of business you run, your website should have 1 of 3 goals:

1. Sell a Product - Self explanatory. If you sell products on your website, a sales transaction is completed by the visitor.
2. Generate Leads - Convert your website visitors into prospects that you put through a sales cycle to get them to become a customer of your business.
3. Increase Readership - This is typically for websites that are content based and make their revenue based on advertising. The more eyeballs on the site, the more money that the company makes.

Create Something to Track

A goal has to be measurable. It has to be a number that can be compared to other similar numbers to measure the effectiveness of the website and changes to the website.

One of the easiest ways to measure a specific goal is to track every time visitor visit a specific page on the web site. This could be:

• Checkout page confirming that a product has been purchased on the site
• “Thank You” page that the visitor lands on after they requested specific information or requested that they be contacted.
• Offer page that the users have to sign up for or that they can print out.

If most of your leads are generated by calls, use services that can track calls from your website. They forward calls directly to our office line so that you can know exactly who called using the phone number that is only present on your website. Here are a couple of companies that can provide this service:

• Telcan.net
• Voicestar

How to Track Your Goals

We use Google Analytics for all of the web sites that we set up and manage. It’s free and tracks goals. To sign up:

1. Go to www.google.com/analytics
2. Click on “Sign Up Now”
3. If you don’t have a Google account, click on “Sign Up Now” to create one. If you do have one, enter your login information.
4. Once you sign up, you will be given HTML code to add to your website
5. Place this in the bottom of every page on your website.

To create and track goals on your website

1. From the home page of Google Analytics, click on “Edit”
2. There are a list of 4 possible goals that you can track. Click on “Edit” next to the first goal.
3. In the text box “Goal URL”, enter the website address of the page you want to track. For example, if we had a thank you page on this site, it might be “http://blog.ivjr.com/thankyou.html”
4. For the Goal Name, enter a value that represents what that goal means, such as “Lead Generated”
5. Click “Save Changes” and Goals will automatically be tracked on your website.

What’s great about “Goals” in Google Analytics is that it provides a lot of contextual information. For example:

• What percentage of visitors to the achieved the goal?
• Where did these visitors come from (other sites, search engines, etc.)
• What pages did they land on when they came to the site?
• What pages convert better than other pages?

Now you can figure out what metric and goal are the most important one for your site and you can start tracking them through your new account. Let’s say that you know this information about your visitors:

• It costs $0.50 for each visitor to the website (if you have PPC, this is readily available)
• Based on Google Analytics, you know that 5% of visitors turn into leads
• From these 2 numbers, you know that it costs $10 for ever lead that you generate
• Each lead is worth $20 to your business.

From this information, you know that you should increase the number of visitors to your website since every additional visitor is bringing you more money. You also might want to increase that conversion rate from 5% to something higher.

When it comes down to it, a website is just one more tool for your business. It’s worthless if it doesn’t do anything to benefit the business. And if you aren’t measuring it, you won’t know if it’s making you money or costing you money. Once you set up goals and start tracking your website, you can start managing it by numbers, and not just by “feel”.

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