How much money is your website making you?

How much money is your website making you?

 

Though it can be difficult to pin down an actual number, there are ways of getting a good idea of how much your website is really worth to your business.

 

Google Analytics and conversion goals

 

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that monitors and reports on the traffic to your website, when you have the tracking code applied to the HTML of your site. To get set up with Google Analytics, all you have to do is visit google.com/analytics and follow the instructions. If you don’t currently have a website, check out our previous post on 6 elements to a successful website.

 

Google explains that the system “helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your audience and their needs, wherever they are along the path to purchase.”

 

But it does more than just telling you how many people have been on your site, you can use it to set goals for what you want to achieve from your site.

 

A goal is a completed activity, also known as a conversion, of a particular action that helps your business. For example, this could be a visitor signing up to receive your e-newsletter, making a product purchase, or simply a high level of engagement with your site.

 

Having clear goals that you can measure, make evaluating the effectiveness of your website and online marketing campaigns, much easier. For instance, if you have an e-commerce site, you will want to track how many visitors are completing purchases. You can do this by creating a goal in Google Analytics that counts the number of visits to the URL of the order confirmation page (the one that customers see when they finish their order).

 

Or, a conversion could be a visitor that books an appointment through your site. At that point you can assign an amount to that conversion – such as the cost of your average bill. Tally up the amount of conversions for online bookings, times them by your average bill cost and that is a good indicator of how much just having an online booking form brings in to your salon.

 

Head to your Google Analytics account, and under ‘view’ you’ll find ‘goals’, click on ‘new goal’ and simply follow the wizard.

 

 

Tracking telephone numbers

 

By using a separate trackable telephone number on your website, that is found nowhere else, you can see exactly how many people are visiting your website before calling your salon.

 

These are numbers that have your local area code but are different from your general salon telephone number. Providers of these numbers can be found online and they shouldn’t be expensive. We use (www.invoco.net)

 

It’s also a great way to track your offline marketing efforts too (leaflets, posters, etc) to determine ROI (return on investment). Using separate phone numbers for separate campaigns allows you to track which campaigns your visitors found you from, letting you track a campaign’s success rate.

 

Let me show you an example of how it works for me. I get about 30 telephone calls direct from my website tracking number to my salon landline every week. That’s 30 people viewing my website (mostly on mobiles, I might add) clicking the telephone number and calling us direct. About 10% of those calls are for directions or for price information but roughly 90% are for actual bookings.

 

So if out of those 30 calls in a week, 27 of them are for a booking with us, and using our current average bill amount, I can work out the ROI of having the telephone number on our website. With an average bill of £51 (net of VAT), we have generated approximately £1,377 in future sales. That’s a whopping £63,000 a year in website sales. Not bad for having a telephone number on a website eh?

 

Once you see that your website is a powerful marketing tool driving sales and traffic to your salon business, then you might just begin to look at it in a different light.

Is your website up-to-date with the latest software and marketing tools? Does it need a bit of a refresh or perhaps a new design to bring it to life again? BOOSTmySALON can help you build your perfect new website, refresh an old one or even just give you a bit of advice on what you can do to BOOST its pulling power. Get in contact today for a FREE no-obligation business and marketing audit.

 

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