Is Your Website Ready For An Advertising Campaign?
Many prospective clients come to us with tons of excitement about their newly minted website, and it crushes me to burst their bubble by asking the following questions:
- What’s your average time on site?
- What are your average pages per visit?
- What’s your most popular exit page?
- What’s your bounce rate?
- What are your KPIs?
- What’s your current conversion rate?
- What’s the average revenue per visit?
- What percentage of visitors return?
- What’s your lifetime value of a customer?
These questions are not meant to be soul-crushing. They are meant to provide a set of solid baseline statistics we can use to compare future marketing campaigns against. Once we know solid statistics about how the website performs, we can make strategic recommendations on how to improve any of the metrics above, to make sure we are optimizing traffic flow BEFORE we spend valuable time and money funneling new prospective customers to your website.
What’s fun about online statistics is that it all comes down to math. If you know your conversion rate is 20%, and your customers all spend an average of $25 per visit, then we can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that with a $5,000 media budget, an average CPC of $5.00, and a 20% conversion rate, the campaign will break even. Of course, if any of these variables change, so does the campaign profitability.
So, where do we stand? Are we still friends? Can we have a productive discussion about how to best leverage online advertising channels to propel your business forward? Or is it time to pause, dig into the Google Analytics reports, and build a solid grasp of your website’s strengths and weaknesses?
Once everyone is on the same page about whether the website is ready to be an effective sales tool for your business, you can spend advertising dollars with confidence, knowing your ROI will be something to celebrate.
