how to optimize your website's performance . . .

first ...
evaluate how well your website is currently meeting your goals.

If your goal is simply to get visitors for the sake of selling advertising...then the name of the game for you is traffic. This can be achieved through a integrated campaign that might rely on search engine optimization, viral marketing, direct marketing and pay-per-click advertising. your web site must be optimized to connect with the user enough so they will return and be willing to drive others to the site for you.

If you are like most organizations with a website however, your main objective is to create customers...whether they be product consumers, service clients, members, affiliates, partners, investors, etc. This means that the usability and experience on your website is just as important as it is to get people to your website. Your main objective is to provide enough information for them to respond. Depending on your business model, this could be a phone call, website contact form, order, enrollment, or some other desirable outcome that directly impacts your bottom line.

What is usability? Usability represents the website's ability to support a quality experience for website visitors. Your website should promote interactivity. It should also empower the visitor to control their experience on your site, all the while establishing value to the user. The more pertinent the site is to what they need, the more they will click...the more they click, the more "sticky" your site is considered to be. This is one time when being sticky is a very good thing!

Usability is a somewhat subjective, but there are tools to help you quantify how effective your website is in meeting your audience's needs.

One of the ways to determine how effectively you are meeting your audience's needs is to analyze your website statistics which provide powerful, data-based perspective of what people are doing on your website during any given time period.

If you have a website, you MUST have statistics or analytics reporting. Not having site statistics is like working in a vacuum. You will never really know what is working and what is not.
Analytics are the key to gaining a factual perspective of what people have been doing on your website. After all, you can't determine where you are going if you don't know where you've been.

The most important historic data you'll gather from stastitical reporting includes:

1. how many unique visitors have come to your website during any specific time frame.
2. what pages are being clicked on, and how often.
2. measurement of response: How effective is your site getting visitors to the page that determines success? This might be your contact form, order form or demo request, depending on what your goal is.

The more sophisticated your online and integrated marketing programs become, the more data you'll need in order to proactively manage your site for optimum results.
Some 3rd party website analytics reporting solutions will tell you what sequence web pages are visited, what page visitors tend to abandon and trends in website traffic. This level of data is most valuable to businesses that have larger sites, multiple customer groups, or various sources of visitors. Most small businesses can benefit from basic statistics until their website marketing programs mature.

second...
identify what you would like to achieve with your website.

Amazingly, this can be difficult for many business owners to do. Because the Internet continues to evolve and mature at warp-speed, most executives haven't been able to keep up enough to know what they should expect from their website.

Defining your goals is critical to creating an actionable plan to leverage your website as an extension of your business. Need help? Contact us today and an expert will explore how we can help you achieve your goals effectively and cost-efficiently.