Why Do I have a Business Website and How is it Doing?
Part 1: Purpose - What is the Ultimate Goal of My Website?

Before you can successfully market your website, it is essential that you truly understand why you have a website in the first place and what the value of your website is.

Why Do I Have a Business Website and How is it Doing?
Part 1: Purpose - What is the Ultimate Goal of My Website? June 10, 2009
Part 2: Monetization - How Much are my Website Goals Worth? June 17, 2009
Part 3: Site-Assessment - How is My Website Actually Performing? June 24, 2009
Part 4: Taking Action - What Do I Do With All This Data? July 1, 2009

Hello, my name is Jeff Gibson and I'm the newest member of the Sitepro team. I've joined Lauren Haugh in Sitepro's Internet Marketing Team, and we are both passionate about helping businesses effectively market their websites.

Before you can successfully market your website, it is essential that you truly understand why you have a website in the first place and what the value of your website is. In this series I will take a look at some key questions you need to ask yourself about your website, and I will show you how to measure the performance of your website.

Why does your business have a website?
This seems like such an obvious question and yet it often stumps many website owners. Many answers can come to mind: "to tell people about my company", "to promote my company blog", "to get people to sign up for my newsletter", "to sell stuff", etc. With answers like these it's no wonder many business owners are looking at such online metrics as "time on site", "number of page views", "number of visits", or even "number of sales" as measures of success or failure.

These answers and others like them ignore the real purpose of a business website, however, which is........................ to make money! Could it really be that simple?

Given that the purpose of a business is to make money (to bring in more money than goes out), one would think this was an obvious answer, but the truth is that this simple explanation is not obvious to many business website owners. You might be thinking "that's all fine and good for an ecommerce site, but I don't sell things on my business website." But step back a minute and look at your business as a whole - chances are you have money coming in and money going out. I would also go out on a limb and guess that your business is designed to bring in more money than it spends. Whether your revenue comes from online sales, advertising, grants or donations, somehow money is coming in and your website is contributing to that effort in some way. (If you feel this broad definition of the purpose of a business website is too general and doesn't apply to your business website, I would love to hear from you - please comment.)

Assuming you are with me in concluding that a business website exists to make money in some way, shape, or form, we can move on to the implications of this premise. A website in itself is worthless; the value comes from getting people to do something on your website. Anything you want someone to do on your website is a conversion goal and every goal has a value. In the case of an ecommerce website this idea is easy to calculate: the goal is an order and the order is worth $x. But what about other, less easily measurable goals like a newsletter signup, pdf download, or viewing a specific page? In this case you'll have to put in a little more work to calculate a value - but just because it's harder to calculate, doesn't mean the value is any less important or real.

Next week in Part 2: Monetization - How Much are my Website Goals Worth? June 17, 2009 we will take a closer look at how to define the value of each website goal. Between now and then, I encourage you to make a list of everything you want your website visitors to do, explain why you want them to do it, and try to ballpark a value associated with each goal. You may be thinking, "I have no idea what this goal is worth to me" - in which case I invite you to come back next week where we will address that very issue.

Key Takeaway - Every business website's goal is to make money directly or indirectly by getting visitors to do something on the website, and it is essential that you clearly define what it is you want your visitors to do and to assign a value to each goal.