Advertise or Re-Design? – Part 1

It’s easy to make hidden assumptions when faced with difficult problems. If your web site hasn’t been making you enough money, you might have recently asked yourself how you could do a better job promoting it. Or, you may have considered hiring someone to re-design your site in the hopes that a fresh look might help.

Underperforming web sites suffer from one of two problems: insufficient traffic or a low conversion rate. To illustrate the difference, imagine a store in the mall. If lots of people are coming in but no one’s buying, you have a low conversion rate. If no one’s coming in at all, you might assume that you have a traffic problem. The million-dollar question, though: how do you know that attracting more visitors would result in more sales?

Falsely assuming that you have a traffic problem might lead you to invest in advertising – leading to a high number of visitors who don’t buy anything.

Falsely assuming that you have a conversion problem might lead you to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a new web site when there was nothing wrong with the old one.

You’ll have to assume some risk here, but don’t just guess at the nature of your problem. Here are some basic steps to help get you started.

1. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed, that needs to become your first order of business. Get thirty days worth of traffic data before spending any serious money on anything; it’s important to find out where you stand.
2. List the specific actions a user can take on your site. Do you have your phone number listed prominently in clear view? Do you have an online contact form that people can fill out? Can a user subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed?
3. Make sure that you have a way to track how many people are taking each of the actions listed in step 2. (For example, can you tell if your site had 500 visitors and 32 of them signed up for your newsletter?) If you get a heavy volume of inbound phone calls, you might consider setting up a separate phone number just for your web site. That will make it easy to tell where callers got your number.

If you start by doing these three things and diligently running your numbers at the end of every month, you’ll soon start to see a clearer picture of your problem – unless you just aren’t getting a significant amount of traffic. In that case, you may want to advertise a bit, but with one caveat: don’t count on making any money.

When you aren’t getting enough traffic, the goal of an advertising campaign is to collect data. If you make money, that’s a bonus – and you probably won’t make money at this stage unless you’re extremely lucky.

In next week’s post, I’ll talk about how to make sure your campaign is successful and that you get useful data.