Website Return On Investment

Better Website return on investment (or ROI) comes from knowing exactly what the income and expenses are for your web site. In fact it's no different from any other business, offline or online. You've got to read your bottom line.

To get a decent website return on investment you have to know exactly what your web site costs you each month... This is your investment.

Then you can subtract the investment (monthly cost) from the money made by the site that month, and you'll know what your profit is. Already you are well on your way to a better website ROI, because the average webmaster doesn't do this. It's too much trouble for them.

Next, you divide the monthly income created by your web site by the number of unique visitors it has had during the time period. Please note, unique visitors are not so-called 'hits'. Hits are pretty useless, because each visitor can create dozens of 'hits' by viewing multiple pages, coming back to the site later, or both.

For example, let's say my website had 5000 unique visitors last month, and the site's takings were just $350. Then the value of each visitor to me is 350/5000 = 0.07 -- or seven cents a visitor.

To get a better website ROI, then, I need to know exactly how many visitors it takes to a particular sales page to make one sale. I'm told the industry average is around 100 viewers to one sale, that's 1 percent. But this percentage can vary tremendously, depending on the wording you place on that page.

Some people can sell to one out of every six visitors. Others may need 400 visitors to a page before they make one sale, and some people's pages will never make a sale.

Skilled copywriters, who can create successful sales letters with a high conversion rate are very highly sought after, and command extremely high fees... up to tens of thousands of dollars for writing one sales letter. You may not have that kind of money to spend, but you can almost certainly improve what you've got right now.

As long as you keep track of these figures each and every month, you can make improvements to your site and get a better website ROI.