Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Funds for a new website? Isn't the one we have working fine?

Too many marketers and website owners have experienced it: The uphill struggle to convince management to approve budget for a new website or a major revamp of the existing one. 

The challenge is often that when measuring the success of a website, management focus on transactional metrics, such as:

  • Unique visitors
  • Repeat visitors
  • Demand generation
  • Sales 

Why invest in a new website when all these metrics are showing growth?

Two reasons:

  • Transactional metrics always show something about the past, not the the future; Past performance is no guarantee for future performance.
  • The competition might have a greater success with their websites.

The solution is to implement a website effectiveness survey that not only measures visitors' success and loyalty, but also benchmarks your data with the industry average. Such an on-going research program gives you great insight into:

  • What you can expect in the future (visitor loyalty)
  • How your website is performing compared to your industry, today and over time
  • How your website can be further improved

Provided with insight also to attitudinal metrics, management are in a much better position to invest intelligently and timely in your website.

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