Support
Tips and articles

Website value

How valuable is your website?

Is a website good value for your business? Most businesses have a good understanding of the value of activities such as advertising. How do these compare to maintaining a website?

The value of a website will depend on the nature of your business, especially how it fits in with your other marketing and sales activities.

The most obvious element of the value of a website is as straight advertising. Like any other advertising, you can calculate the cost per viewer (or listener or reader). All readers are not equal, however, visitors to your website are actively seeking information, rather than passively glancing at a magazine. In some ways these visitors are more like shoppers browsing your displays than passive viewers seeing your ad while involved in some other activity.

While an advertisement must be paid for each time it is run, a website remains online. To calculate the cost per view, it might be appropriate to add all viewers over a span such as one year. This means the effective circulation of a website is actually larger by more than a factor of ten.

Not only does your website serve as an advertisement, it enables you to cost-effectively provide much more detailed information than you would be able to place in an advertisement, and without the associated printing costs to boot!

The wide reach of the internet can enable you to reach new markets and so generate new sales. Of course this only works if your business has the capacity to sell to these markets. While the low Australian currency must help, new delivery and customer support mechanisms may be needed.

Another important benefit a good website can deliver is to support customer loyalty. By supplying useful news or support information, a website can help to maintain customer awareness of the benefits you offer. What is the value of a continuing customer compared to the cost of finding a new one for your business?

The value of direct sales made through an e-commerce website is obvious. It is less well known that many customers uncertain of the security of the Internet are using e-commerce to make buying decisions then completing the sale over the phone or via fax. Are you getting more calls from customers who know exactly what they want?

How do you determine the value of the extra information a good website can provide in support of a sale? In the absence of hard information on sales conversion ratios, unfortunately you can only make estimates. If customers react to your advertisement by seeking more information on your website are they more likely to make a purchase?

An important element of the value of a website is the information that is gathered on customer behavior. Does your best selling product have the most viewed page, or is another product more popular? The value of this sort of information is hard to judge, but where it guides you to more effective selling the value can be substantial.

One final thought on the value of a website is to consider the value of the additional interaction with customers it can support. E-mail, newsletters, and discussion groups can be powerful ways of leveraging your website to help make your customers feel supported and part of a community.