This article is all about testing and improving your website results. Within your normal business you will always be looking for ways to make everything work better. You need to do the same with your website. The tune process can be summed up with three words – ‘Test’, 'Measure' and 'Tune'.

One of the reasons the Internet is a direct marketer’s dream, is just about everything can be measured automatically! If you’ve been in business for any length of time you will know how hard it can be to measure your results (and it takes a heap of time and effort). Website marketing is quite different– you barely have to lift a finger, it just happens!

Most people just don’t get how incredibly powerful this is!

If you understand what needs to be measured, then you can measure it, read the measurements and make adjustments to your website to improve your overall result. This is unbelievably powerful!

So, what do you need to measure?

Well that is a subject in our book– “Website Fundamentals – How to Generate Amazing Results Online! ”. But to save you sourcing the relevant section right now, the crucial parts follow…

Success Metrics

Within any business there are a number of simple success metrics that determine the performance of the business.

In the physical world, success metrics are– leads, conversion rate, average sale and margin. Let’s take a closer look at each of these:

• Leads
  A lead is a potential customer that has enquired about your product or service. The leads success metric represents the number of people that have enquired about your products or services over a particular period of time.

• Conversion Rate
  The conversion rate is the percentage of people that purchased products or services from you. A 20% conversion rate means that for every 10 leads you made two sales.

• Average Sale
  The average sale represents how much people usually spend with you. Each time customers buy from you, do they spend, on average $20, $200, or $2000?

• Margin
  The margin is the percentage of every sale that is profit– after all the costs are taken out. A 20% margin on a $1,000 sale means your profit was $200.

The most important thing to understand about success metrics is this –

If you can increase ANY ONE of the success metrics then your business will make more money!

It’s that simple.

If you want to run a successful business you need to know and understand success metrics and therefore how they influence your business. The same applies if you want to run a successful website– you need to understand success metrics on the Web and how they affect your website.

The key success metrics for a website that sells products, with transactions automatically completed online (an ecommerce website), are ‘visitors’, ‘conversion rate’ and ‘average sale’.

‘Visitors’ is a new success metric, which is a more accurate description of receiving a prospect on an e-commerce website. The ‘visitors’ success metric refers to the amount of ‘traffic’, or visitors, your website receives.

As with most businesses, the ‘margin’ is still determined by the physical aspects of the business (and includes the cost of running the website, so it is an expense that affects your margin).

The key success metrics for a website that is focused on generating enquiries (an Profile website) are ‘visitors’ and ‘conversion rate’.

An Profile website is designed to generate leads. Everything after the generation of the lead on the Profile website is still processed in the physical world.

An example of a company using an Profile website would be a service-oriented business, or a business with large custom-made products that are less suitable for making purchases and payments via an Ecommerce website.

So on the Internet, success metrics can be summarised as follows:

Learn How to Increase your Number of Website Visitors

Learn How to Increase your Average Sale Amount