Webmastering Biker

Generally speaking, I always think that if you make in direct attributable revenue from a web site the amount you put in to create it then that is a positive return on investment. A naive way of looking at it, and I can't say that I spend vast amounts of time calculating monetary value from a web site, but if your intention is to make money online then that I think is the minimum goal. Anything extra, of course is then profit.

This is quite simple if you are selling directly to someone because the measure of success is purely monetary in nature. The difficulty of course in measuring ROI is when either the product is too complex to sell via the internet or requires alternative methods of communication. What prompted me to write about this is due to a website I created for my brother in law who has started up a tree and garden business in Carmarthen. The site I created for him is simple, I didn't charge him and I spent the odd hours here and there doing it, and to tell you the truth it is no where near finished. Yet since it has been up, he has procured three jobs that would have covered the creation of a medium sized e-commerce site. Now, he knows that the phone calls have come via interest in the web site because he doesn't have any other form of marketing... and they told him that they called him after seeing his web site. Were he to have an alternative method of direct marketing then that phone call is more difficult to trace (other than asking outright where the caller has arrived from).

Harder still is when you are selling complex products like the company I work for, which sells CRM and sales management systems. The greater the investment the longer and more complex the process from sales prospect to close of deal. The corporate site may be one of many factors that a person may encounter in the build up to a sale from enquiring into products, costs and personell. They may visit several times over a period of months, but one thing is certain it is difficult to assess how much the site has played in the process. It is conceivable that they might not have resulted in your product if they had not seen your web site, certainly this is true if they first found you through organic search, but also even if they hadn't, it is also conceivable that if subsequent to a face to face meeting a prospect might visit your site to re-enforce knowledge and further research your products. The corporate site evidently fills different roles and must meet the expectation of every stage of a prospective sales process, but your site may not directly make any money. However, that doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile investment.

So, how do you calculate ROI? In my opinion this is not the right question. What should be asked is how do you calculate the loss of not having an effective web site? And by effective, I mean any way that you would gain any advantage on the web, be it a useful contact, exposure to different markets or just a central resource for existing clients. Take away that site and you open up the opportunity of the web world finding your competitor and having another option other than the one they would have had if they found you.