How to Evaluate the Return on Investment of Your Website

When creating a website, it is to serve clearly defined objectives: generate leads; generate sales; increase brand awareness, etc.

However, often once the site is live, there is no real follow-up, making it difficult to determine if the site has achieved its goals and if it has generated a satisfactory return on investment. How can you determine if your website is truly benefiting you?

Define Quantifiable Objectives

Defining an objective is primarily about defining a quantity: how many sales? How many leads? How many visits? An objective only exists when it can be measured. It is not always easy to set such a number because you may not have the necessary perspective or experience to evaluate it. Nevertheless, it is essential to set a quantity; otherwise, it is impossible to say whether the objective will be met. As physicist Niels Bohr said: "What cannot be measured does not exist."

Define Performance Indicators

If your goal is to increase your number of clients, you need to define how your site will enable you to achieve this; for example, through your contact form. A message via your contact form will thus be your performance indicator.

It is advisable to manage several indicators at different levels:

• Leads through the site's contact form,
• The number of visits to measure your site's popularity,
• The number of pages viewed per visit to assess smooth navigation on your site,
• The average duration of visits to determine if users are thoroughly reading your pages.

If you have only one performance indicator, it will be difficult to explain its results, whether they are good or bad. Imagine you don't have as many contacts as you would like; having other indicators will allow you to establish correlations. For example, you might see that you simply don't have enough visitors to achieve a sufficient number of contacts, or that users aren't staying on your pages long enough to discover your services.

Define the Return on Investment

Once you have defined your main performance indicator, in this case, the number of contacts, you still need to convert this value into euros. In short, how much revenue can a contact generate? To find out, you need to:

• Count the number of contacts,
• Define your conversion rate, in other words, the proportion of these contacts that you will convert into contracts,
• Define the revenue a contract brings you,
• Multiply the number of your contacts by the conversion rate and then by the average revenue.

For example, to make it concrete:

• You have 20 contacts,
• You win one out of two deals, so your conversion rate is 50%,
• The average revenue of a contract is €5,000,
• This results in: 20 x 50% x 5000 = €50,000.

And there you have your well-defined projected revenue!

All that's left is to define your return on investment, which is the revenue divided by the cost of the site. For example, if your site cost €5,000, your return on investment index will be 10 (50,000 / 5,000). There you have your website's return on investment evaluated!

I hope this will help you gain a solid understanding of the financial aspect of your website project.