If you’ve owned or managed a shop for more than ten minutes, you’ve probably had a salesperson call you and tell you how much business they can get you with one of their websites. It’s a fair point – if a person doesn’t already have a shop picked out, most people look online to find shops these days. But a few minutes into the conversation, they start telling you how they’re going to prove results – website ‘hits’. They offer to show you regularly just how many people are visiting your website. If this is their idea of return on investment, this is a red flag.
Why? Let’s take a look at the value of a website ‘hit’.
They may call it a ‘visit’ but that’s not entirely accurate. That’s because, half of all ‘visits’ to your website are just other computers that are taking a look at the material. Search engines like Google must visit your website often, for instance, to make sure they know what content is there and can direct their users to your site. Furthermore, if you run a shop in Wisconsin, how useful is it really that someone in South Carolina visited your site? In most cases, not at all. Unfortunately, the majority of ‘hits’ your website gets provide no value to you at all.
A website cannot prove a return on investment based on how many visits the site gets. True ROI comes from a customer visiting your shop. Here are a few ways to know your site is providing a good return.
Coupons – Some shop owners prefer not to use coupons, but if you do, it’s a great barometer for where your business is coming from. Collecting the coupons used by your customers, and matching them up with where they found the coupon, is a great way to measure what’s bringing in business.
Phone Calls – One of our website packages includes Call Analytics – a special phone number only located on your website that is tracked and recorded. In addition to allowing you to analyze your customer service, this also enables you to see how many customers are going to your website and calling your shop each month. By listening to the calls, you can even figure out exactly how much money those calls brought into your shop!
Online Quote Requests – Although our sites are designed to encourage customers to contact you via phone (as that leads to a higher close rate) we also provide online forms for customers who prefer to make requests this way. Much like the phone calls, each of these forms tells you what service the customer is seeking, allowing an easy calculation of ROI.
Asking Your Customers – One way to figure out where customers heard about you is to ask! Be careful with this one, though. They may have gotten your name from a friend, but then gone online to learn more about you and find out your location. Without the site, it’s possible they would have never found you. So, in addition to asking how they heard about you, make sure to ask if they visited your website for directions or to learn more.
To learn more about how to measure your website ROI, call us at 1-866-665-1605 or email Team_RSW@repairshopwebsites.com