Pageviews, visits, unique visitors, followers, etc. are all great ways to measure success online, but what about actions that don’t lead directly to a conversion or lead (but probably will down the line)? How do you measure actions that may lead to something important later, but there’s not a direct connection online? Assigning a value to those actions may help…
A website visitor may play around with your ‘build a car’ feature but not do anything else online. Are visitors who ‘build a car’ online more or less likely to eventually buy a car from you? How many people that do buy a car from you use the ‘build a car’ feature on your website? Obviously there’s an offline component that needs to be tied to the online action. The only way to really know how the online action ties to the offline action is to do a little market research. This could be as simple as asking your customers or a more in-depth market survey. Once you know how the ‘build a car’ function on the website is tied to actually buying a car, you can assign it a value.
Sometimes both the actions are online, but may not be directly connected. For example, a website visitor clicks on your clearance ad in an email, but doesn’t purchase anything that day. So what’s the percentage of people that click on the clearance ad vs. the number that buy? This conversion is a bit easier to calculate, but it still may make sense to assign a value to clicking the clearance ad.
Why assign a value to a particular action? Because it can help you understand how certain online actions influence the sales funnel. More importantly, it can help you figure out how to organize your site, what actions should be emphasized, and what actions should have marketing or advertising campaigns.
Do you assign value to actions online? How do you figure out what’s important on your website?
(photo by kennymatic @ FlickrCC)
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