Your Website is Your Business Lab
by Paul "the soaring" Siegel
Don't merely gather statistics, analyze visitor logs, or evaluate traffic. Experiment!
Yes, experiment. First, define your goals. Second, design experiments to test their worth. Third, obtain results of the experiments. Once an experiment is completed, modify your goals and your experiments for the next round.
DEFINE GOALS
Goals should be both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative goals may be expressed, per unit of time, as:
- Number of visitors
- Number of transactions
- Increase in income
- Decrease in expense
Qualitative goals, though harder to express, are just as important. They usually concern:
- Credibility
- Trust
- Loyalty
DESIGN EXPERIMENTS
Both quantitative and qualitative goals may be achieved by means of the design of the site, by judicious linking, and by building a community of clients/prospects.
Naturally, you design a Learning Fountain that is attractive to the visitors you are seeking. You begin with your understanding of who they are, what their problems may be, and what they want to learn.
As part of your design you are careful to include in the text, keywords which you believe your target audience may use. You also place their keywords in the page topic and in the so-called META tags on top of the home page. Because you may be able to attract your prospects through different clusters of keywords, it pays to divide your site into several sections, each emphasizing a different aspect and thus sporting different keywords.
Also develop a strategy for attracting visitors through linking. It's common to list your site in search engines and directories, where people find your site via your keywords. Another approach is to negotiate links from complementary sites to your site.
Don't seek lots of visitors. Seek the right visitors.
In addition to linking, set up a community of interested visitors and define ways of checking its progress.
TEST RESULTS
Statistical tools are available for:
- number of visitors per hour, day, week, month, to determine how many come and when
COUNTING FETCHED PAGES - number of pages viewed, to determine how interested viewers are and what pages interest them most
DETERMINING WHERE VISITORS COME FROM - from search engines or via links from other websites.
Among the best of these statistical tools is WebTrends. If your ISP has it, use it. Otherwise, try Hit List.
Statistical tools may test directly your first quantitative goal: Number of visitors. A separate means needs to be provided for testing your second goal: Number of transactions. This may be done by storefront software.
If you pay for linking - you advertise - you want to determine if your advertising is worthwhile. The average number of visitors who click on a banner ad is roughly 2%. Of those who visit a site, most often only about .5% complete a sale. In other words, roughly 1 in 10,000 of those clicking on a banner ad can be expected to complete a sale. If your site is excellent and you achieve a conversion rate (per cent of visitors executing a sale) of 2%, then you will have 4 sales with the same number of clicks. Advertising is rarely worth it for low-priced products.
The last 2 quantitative goals - increase in income and decrease in expense - require further figuring. But in the last analysis, these are the figures of merit that truly count.
MODIFICATION
Now that experimentation has shown you what works and what doesn't, change goals and modify your experiment. Change site design elements, linking approach, and community building methods. After a period of time test again and modify your experimental set-up once more.
Continuous experimentation leads to continuous improvement!
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