412 101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site

There are a few basic ways to improve your success online:
• Generate more traffic to your Web site—that’s what this book is
all about.
• Improve your conversion rate or convert more of your Web site
visitors into paying customers.
• Your sales conversion rate is affected by:
– How well you have targeted your audience
– How good your offer is
– How convincing your copy is
– How well your audience knows you—loyalty and trust
factors
– Reducing the clicks to buy—the more clicks to the checkout,
the more abandoned shopping carts
• Get your customers to buy more. Ways to do this include:
– Cross-sell
– Up-sell
– Improve your sales copy
– Offer value-added services, such as gift wrapping and expedited
shipping.
If you don’t track, you can’t measure. If you don’t measure, you
don’t improve. It is as simple as that.
What to Measure
The digital nature of the Web makes the medium inherently measurable.
You need to know what to measure, how to measure it, and
TEAM LinG - Live, Informative, Non-cost and Genuine!
Web Metrics 413
how to improve over time. Quite often industry benchmarks are irrelevant.
What you are concerned with is measuring your own
organization’s results and ratios and improving them month after
month. As long as you keep getting better at what you’re doing and
improving your performance and bottom line, does it really matter
that there is a benchmark out there that you’re not beating? There are
too many variables at play that can distort industry-wide or Internetwide
benchmarks.
Some of the key metrics that you want to measure include:
• Conversion ratio
• Sales per visitor
• Cost per visitor
• Net profit per sale
• Return on investment.
Conversion Ratio (CR)
A conversion ratio is the number of times a desired action is taken,
presented as a percentage of the number of opportunities for the action
to be taken. Although most people look at this ratio as the conversion
of a site visitor into a paying customer, there are many other conversion
ratios that are relevant. Conversion ratios of site visitors to sign-ups for
any permission marketing opportunity (newsletters, coupons, e-specials)
is a very important ratio.
By way of example, let’s assume you have 300 visitors to your Web
site in a day and you have 30 sales in the same time period. The sales
conversion ratio would be:
The number of people who purchase divided by the number of people
who visit the site: 30/300 = 10 percent
If you had 3,000 visitors and 30 sales, your conversion ratio would
be 1 percent: 30/3,000 = 1 percent
If you could find a way to increase your conversion ratio from 1
percent to 2 percent, you will have doubled your sales. Obviously, the
higher the conversion ratio the better.
TEAM LinG - Live, Informative, Non-cost and Genuine!
414 101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site
Sales per Visitor (SPV)
The sales per visitor is calculated by taking the gross sales or total dollar
sales amount for a period of time divided by the number of visitors
over the same period of time.
If you have $3,000 in sales for the day and 300 visitors, you have a
$10 sales per visitor ratio: $3,000 sales/300 visitors = $10 SPV.
You want to increase this number over time.
Cost per Visitor (CPV)
Your cost per visitor can be calculated two ways. You can look at your
total cost per visitor over all marketing activities, or you can choose to
measure your cost per visitor for a specific campaign. The specific-campaign
measurement is more relevant because you want to know which
Internet marketing activities are most cost-effective and yield a higher
return on investment.
To calculate your overall cost per visitor, you simply take all your
marketing expenses and divide by the number of unique visitors.
To calculate a campaign-specific cost per visitor, you take the cost
of the campaign and divide it by the number of unique visitors provided
by that campaign. Let’s run an example. Let’s say you run a banner
advertising campaign that costs you $20 CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
And let’s further assume you get a 1 percent click-through
rate. Your 1 percent click-through yields you ten visitors (1,000 × 1percent
= 10 visitors). Your cost per visitor for this campaign is $2. You
take the campaign cost (in this case, $20) and divide it by the number of
visitors (in this case, ten): $20/10 visitors = $2 cost per visitor for this
campaign.
Cost per Sale (CPS)
Your cost per sale is calculated as the cost of your campaign divided by
the number of sales it produces.
Let’s follow through on the previous example. Our campaign cost
was $20 for 1,000 banner ad impressions. We had a 1 percent clickthrough
rate, or ten visitors. Let’s assume that 10 percent of our visitors
TEAM LinG - Live, Informative, Non-cost and Genuine!
Web Metrics 415
bought, so 10 percent is one sale. To calculate our cost per sale, we take
our campaign cost and divide it by the number of sales: $20 campaign
cost/1 sale = $20 CPS.
Net Profit per Sale (NPPS)
Let’s continue with our example. Let’s assume that each sale produces
at $45 gross profit. Gross profit is calculated by taking the selling price
and subtracting the cost of goods sold. Net profit per sale is calculated
by taking the net profit and subtracting our cost-per-sale (which is the
previous calculation we figured as $20). The net profit per sale for this
campaign is: Gross profit per sale - cost per sale: $45 - $20 = $25 NPPS.
Return on Investment (ROI)
The return on investment before non-marketing expenses is calculated
by taking the net profit per sale and dividing it by the investment or the
cost per sale. In this case, you had a $25 net profit per sale divided by
$20 cost per sale: $25/$20 = 125 percent ROI.
This campaign was profitable. But you need to do these calculations
for all of your campaigns so that you can compare them against each
other to see where you want to focus your marketing dollars and also to
improve your ratios over time on the same types of marketing activities—
in other words, get better at the game.
Web Metrics Tools
Now that you have learned how to do all the calculations and your
heart is racing thinking about this new full-time job that has just been
created, we’ll let you in on a few tools that might help.
Some of the tools available include:
• AdMinder (http://www.adminder.com). AdMinder can calculate
not only the cost per click, but also the cost per sale (or action)
and the return on investment for that particular campaign.
TEAM LinG - Live, Informative, Non-cost and Genuine!
416 101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site
AdMinder allows for easy management of multiple campaigns
by displaying ads that are scheduled to run in the near future
and ads that are about to expire. AdMinder allows for the export
of data to Excel or any other spreadsheet software.
• FutureNowInc.com (http://www.futurenowinc.com/digital
salescalculators.htm). The FutureNow Digital Sales Calculator
includes 22 metrics.
• NetAuditNow (http://netauditnow.com). NetAuditNow is a service
that logs onto your Web server, grabs your log files, and
then uses them to spit out reports. One of the reports that
NetAuditNow generates is the advertising quality and returnon-
investment report. This report compares the quantity (total
and average number) to quality (time, pages viewed, and purchases)
of visitors who came to your site from various ad banners
and links. Can report on everything from search engine
traffic to total monthly page views and unique visitors.
• Net Quantify (http://www.netquantify.com). Online reports reveal
which placements generate the most sales, registrations, and
any other activity you want to track.
• PromotionStat (http://www.promotionstat.com). PromotionStat
reports on and separates visitors from different advertising vehicles
or sources and tracks their behaviors once they’re on
your site.
Internet Resources for Chapter 28
I have included a few resources for you to check out regarding Web
metrics. For additional resources on a variety of topics, I recommend
that you visit the Resources section of my Web site at http://www.
susansweeney.com/resources.html. There you will find additional tips,
tools, techniques, and resources.
How to Interpret Web Metrics
http://www.clickz.com/sales/traffic/article.php/992351
An interesting article on how to interpret what all these numbers mean.
TEAM LinG - Live, Informative, Non-cost and Genuine!
Web Metrics 417
Web Metrics and ROI
http://www.stepbystepwebmarketing.com/bottom.php
Another article about Web metrics from the Institute of International
Research.
Understanding Web Metrics to Improve Site Performance
http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol29/metrics.htm
Many online entrepreneurs fail to properly understand and utilize their
site’s metrics. Here’s an in-depth look on how statistics can be used to
achieve traffic, marketing, sales, and customer service goals.
Marketing Experiment
http://www.marketingexperiments.com/archives/web_metrics_pt1.cfm
Marketing Experiment tests 26 different Web metrics tools to determine
the simplest, most accurate way to capture the numbers you need.