For several years now, businesses have been focusing on SEO and PPC campaigns to improve traffic on their websites and achieve top rankings. The sole purpose of SEO and PPC budgets has been to get as many clicks as possible. This is not a bad goal in its own right. However, recently, marketers have shifted their attention and their budgets towards improving the conversion aspects of their websites.

What happens once a visitor has clicked on your website? What if she leaves your website immediately because she could not find what she was looking on your website or, the navigation was too bad, or the design was too bad or the there was no call to action button and on and on.

Optimizing your website for improved conversion rates is a worthy goal aiming to understand what your customers want and, actaully help them get what they want. The best course of action for marketers to spend their ever shrinking budgets wisely is to clean up the house before they invite guests. So, you understand now what you need to do first after you get your next marketing budget aopproved by your boss.

There are two phases of website ROI. Pre-click and post-click. Both SEO and PPC involve improving the visibility of website while conversion optimization entails the overall customer experience- the way customers actually interact with different aspects of your website. Marketers need to prioritize which effort needs to be taken first.

Few things needed to think hard before you really design your website are as follows.

Determine Goals & Expectations

What do want your website to do for you? The reasons could be many as.:

• Get leads for your business
• Generate revenue for the company
• Enhance the branding image of your company
• Provide information to the interested audience

Determine Your Target Audience

You do not create website for your self. Rather, you always have some purpose behind creating it. You create it so that others can view and take the actions you want them to take. For you to be able to fulfill your target users of the website, you have to understand exactly what objectives they want to accomplish by visiting and using your site, what kind of people they are and how they make decisions you want them regarding the website.

What is website ROI anyway?

The return on investment (ROI) of a web site is the ratio of money gained or lost on your website verses the amount of money you have spent on the website project in whatever way you did.

Measuring the ROI of a Web site

The ROI of a web site can be measured in a number of ways and for a number of factors. A very abstract description of the factors involved in the ROI of a website are as follows.

• Investment on the website

The question to ask here is where it is that you are spending money. In case of a website, following factors could be counted as the money spent on

• Your search engine marketing initiatives including pay per click campaigns etc.
• search engine optimization efforts whether be in-house or outsourced
• Direct marketing
• web site development costs
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Programs
• or any other investment you have made to promote your website in one way or the other

• Return from your website

The outputs or outcomes of your investments on the website project could be as follows.

• Conversion
• Revenue generation
• leads
• Customer satisfaction
• Problem resolution rate etc.

Once you have calculated both the investment and outcomes of your website, you can calculate the ROI of your website by diving the outcomes by the investment. Calculating the ROI seems to be a simple task. However, the hardest part in the equation is to help your customers identify the outcome they want to see by investing on their web properties. Once that part is determined, it will be an easy shot to calculate the costs involved on the project.

Improving ROI

There could be so many ways of improving the ROI of a website. However, the first and foremost important step in this regard is to gather data of the visitors who visit your website.