Easy Ways to Increase Your Website Return On Investment (ROI)

Return On Investment (ROI) is the relationship between the total amount you spend and the total amount you earn from a certain internet marketing campaign. If you are doing any online marketing campaign, then Return On Investment (ROI) is the most important measurement to estimate your success and the one metric that you must work hard on to improve over time. 

Generally speaking, Return On Investment (ROI) is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment and to compare the efficiency of one investment to the other or over a certain period of time.

Return on investment is a very popular metric due to its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a reasonable positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then this investment should not be done. Return On Investment (ROI) is the final measurement of success for any advertising campaign.

With so much discussion centered around Search and driving traffic to your site, it's easy to overlook another equally important key to website ROI - content and navigation optimization. You must design a website that gets visitors to take action.

Did You Set your Goals?

In the dot com days, people designed websites around "user experience" and "usability". Clickthroughs were considered a sufficient measure of success and very few of us paid any attention to website ROI. This has all changed.

Today, website ROI is measured by conversions -- how frequently visitors reach your goals. Goals are activities on your website that are important to the success of your business. Obviously, a sale is a goal if you sell online. A request for a sales call is another example of a goal. So is an email registration. Even if you have a purely brochure-ware site, you might consider viewing the Contact page or a Product Spec page to be a goal. 

Did You Capture that First Click?

A visitor to your site will do one of two things upon entering your site - click deeper into your site or leave. It's a coin toss that most sites lose on their entry page.

Everything on an entry page must be designed and written to entice a visitor to click. Why? That first click is going to be either a conversion to one of your goals or the first step down one of your conversion paths. The visitor gets to choose the path that looks most interesting to her. In doing so, she gives you valuable information about her needs and interests - if you use web analytics and are paying attention. 

Did You Call Your Audience to action?
Buy Now. Add to Shopping Cart. Calls to action, obviously, but not the only ones you should have on your site. Make sure your visitors always know what to do next, so that they aren't left standing in your store, overwhelmed by choices. Add calls to action on every page of your site: Learn More, Help Them Decide, Compare, Next Step. Gently lead visitors down the conversion path, and you'll earn more from the visitors you get.

Did You Simplify Conversion Steps?

The easier it is for a visitor to reach her objective, the more likely it is they will convert. Obviously, you need to provide the information that the visitor needs before they will buy or ask for a sales call, but consider carefully how much information you need to ask for. Do you really need to ask your visitors to select a city from a form when they already give you a zip code?

There you have some cheap and easy ways to increase the Return On Investment (ROI) of your website campaigns and marketing. You don't always need to pay someone else to do what you can simply do yourself with a little thought through the eyes of your website visitor.