CommonPlaces CEO and President Ben Bassi discusses the importance of determining the ROI on your website, and lowering your bounce rate.
An interesting I think about all the time when I look at my clients is what is their ROI on their website and digital marketing investment?
And one of the wonderful things about the type of automation that we bring, and the type of products that we develop, is that you can determine what your ROI is, your return on investment.
And actually, the web is one of the very few mediums out there where you can get an accurate ROI.
I think executives have to start looking more and more at their web business from how much money they invest, and what they get as a return.
Pay-per-click
Certainly, with a lot of the clients who are coming into us now, traditionally they have spent money on pay-per-click campaigns.
With pay-per-click campaigns it's pretty easy. You know what you're paying, you pay for the click, and Google gives you tremendous tools to know what your conversion rates are.
From that you can see what the average value of a transaction is, especially on an ecommerce site, and you can figure out what your cost of acquisition is.
It's a little bit harder when you have something that you can't purchase on the web, but you can delete from the web.
Then you have to integrate into something like Salesforce.com where you can track that lead, follow it as it becomes a prospect and an opportunity, and finally, a savvy customer.
Pay-per-click campaigns have become increasingly expensive. I've heard people say that their clicks are up to tens, and even hundreds of dollars.
You used to be able to get clicks for twenty-five cents, and it was cheap, economical, and a really good way to get somebody to your website.
Bounce rate
So how do you calculate ROI? The first thing that I would look at is what is your bounce rate?
If you're doing a marketing campaign, and you're paying for people to come into your site, what does it cost to get them to your site, what percentage of them bounce, or won't go beyond the homepage?
One thing I tell people is, you want to improve your ROI, cut your bounce rate substantially.
If you have a website with an 80% bounce rate, and you reduced that to a 60% bounce rate that's 20% more people coming in, which means your sale rate theoretically should go up by 30%. That's tremendous.
How did your customer find you
Next to look at is how your customers find you. Google Analytics will give you this, along with marketing services like HubSpot and Freedom.
Was it through a radio campaign, a blog, a marketing campaign? These are all points that people come into, and you can measure if they filled out a contact form, or entered the Salesforce portal, and become a customer.
So, you need to know what your investment is, in terms of what am I putting into my website, what am I putting into my marketing, what are the channels that are deriving revenue.
What is the value of a contact to you?
Conversion rate of contacts
Let's say, for example that you get 15 or 10% of your customers fill out a contact form. Then how many of those people do you actually convert, and what does that mean to you in terms of your business?
You're then able to see, should I put more money into a pay-per-click campaign, should I put more money into blogging, should I put more money into creating more calls to action, and workflows. Where is my payback coming from?
You need to set goals, measurement systems, to insure that the money you are spending in this new digital medium is going towards a return.