About 99% of the people who consult with me about their website do not have a definable outcome for their website. Similar to any business, one must have a target in mind when creating a website. What are you trying to achieve with it? If you don’t have a specific target for your website, how will you determine in measurable terms whether it is successful or not? Your target simply defines your website’s success. Allow me to discuss more about end goals for a successful website.
Gary Ng:
Hi guys welcome back.
One of the questions I get asked a lot when people find out I’m involved in online marketing; they say, “Gary, Gary, I’ve got a new website that’s coming. Can you have a look at my website and tell me what you think?”
I get that question a lot and I ask them, “Well ok, I’ll have a look at it to tell you aesthetically whether I think it looks good or not but beyond that I can’t tell you much” and the reason being is that what are you trying to achieve with the website?
If the website was successful in twelve months’ time how will you know in measurable terms?
And you’d be amazed, 99% of the people I talk to, they don’t have a definable outcome for the website. You wouldn’t work on a business, any successful business you want to have a target, a financial target on what they want to achieve for twelve months.
But most people start a website thinking that it’s something they have to do but why would you spend money on a website? People say, “We’re not really selling stuff online so we just have it for branding or for people to download information”. But you still need to define success.
For downloading information, maybe we could measure the number of hits we get on the website. Well imagine if your website got ranking for the word “Paris Hilton”. You’d get a ton of visitors, is that success?
Maybe the number of enquiries, well then we’re starting to get somewhere. If it’s enquiries and what if you get a whole lot of enquiries but they’re unqualified enquiries?
So wherever the target is it has to start from somewhere.
We’ve got a way to help you define a target that is meaningful for your business but it has to be a measurable target.
If they say, “Oh we want to grow the number of leads that we get. Currently we’re getting ten a day”, then ok if this website was successful; this new website was successful in twelve months’ time, what would that look like? “Oh yeah, we would get more leads”.
Is that from ten to eleven? Or is it from ten to one hundred? Or is it from ten to ten thousand?
Based on the different outcomes that you want to achieve the strategy involved will be significantly different; the resources required or the website required to achieve that will be significantly different as well. So without knowing the end goal of what you’re trying to achieve, I can’t really help them to tell them how does the website fit into the whole rest of the jigsaw puzzle.
So next time when you’re thinking of developing a website, don’t just allocate like five hours and ten thousand dollars, whatever the budget, just for the sake of it. Think of this ten thousand dollars, what is it going to do for my end bottom line in increasing the profit? What is the measurable target I want to achieve from my website for me to feel successful?
And if it’s branding, “Oh Gary, how do you measure branding?” Well what do you think? How will you measure it? What will make you feel like you’re successful?
Every single business is different. You may have a different key KPI to measure it. It could be based on the number of visitors. Well as we talked about earlier, just because there is a number of visitors going to your site, it may not be a sign of highly qualified traffic. It could be unqualified. Well maybe looking at the bounce rate as well.
Bounce rate is when people come to your site, how many of them leave right away cos they accidentally hit on your site.
Another KPI you can have is actually the duration people are staying on site. So how long are they actually staying on the site for? Whether it’s from one minute and you want to grow it to three minutes.
Or are they looking at one particular page that’s really important for you? If someone is a qualified customer they always look at this page. What page is that?
So these are just some of the ideas you can work on next time you’re thinking of designing a new website. Set up some metrics to evaluate success. What you measure improves and what you measure you can actually control.
Leave me any comments you have.
Have a nice day.