Seeing that it’s a new year, I thought it might be beneficial to our blog readers to spend a few minutes and write about the elusive website return on investment.

Every year, billions of dollars are spent on web-based marketing strategies and/or marketing decisions influenced by the web.

And yet, even knowing that they have to spend money on the web, most organizations have no idea what to expect in a return of their web marketing investment.  In my experience, most organizations extremely undervalue the power of the web, much less their own website.

So for a second, let’s simplify and consider one aspect of a company’s web strategy: website usability.  Most website redesigns are completed in an effort to make the organization’s website more usable or to convert at a higher rate. These organizations spend a great deal of time and energy in finding the right agency, determining a budget and yet most companies don’t budget any money specifically to usability testing.  They budget for creative and development but not the user.  This is extremely unfortunate.

So why do we care about usability testing?  Jakob Nielsen states that on average, companies that redesign their websites and spend 10% of their development budget specifically for usability usually see an improvement in conversion rate of 83%!!!  For many organizations, that’s a business altering improvement!

So, how can you see this kind of improvement?  Clickz.com, one of the many great news sources in the marketing industry, offers a free ROI calculator that will assist you in calculating your website design return on investment.  Plug in your current site traffic statistics, and then calculate your expected improvement in a website redesign to determine what your ROI would be.  Here’s the link: Clickz Website ROI Calculator

For more information on ROI or how we might be able to help you get these kind of results, feel free to contact us.

5 Comments

  1. That’s right usability is a must to improve conversion that’s why we have to have a friendly website;-)

  2. Really nice article, really liked it. Read mine also here

  3. Thank you. Your post is very interesting. This is my first visit. And I feel a lot of benefits from your post.

  4. I found this page via a google search. Bookmarked. Thanks!

  5. Awesome. Thanks for the link to that tool.

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