Assessing a Site s Current Business Value

Assessing a Site’s Current Business Value

Sophisticated analysis and reporting applications not only tell you what your customers are doing, but also report on how your business is doing. You can identify the nature of the relationship of current online users, thereby establishing a baseline for your site. It’s difficult to move forward in a useful direction if you don’t know where you are. To assess that relationship, you need to determine how involved current customers are with the site. Finding that out requires getting answers to such questions as:

• Do they simply browse or do they purchase? How much money do they spend? What is the repeat purchase rate?

• How and when do they access the site?

• How much time do they spend on their visits? Is their time being spent in a useful manner or wasted because of poor design and tedious searches?

• How often do they visit the site?

• What are their areas of interest^[1]?

You also need to assess your customers’ actual value to your business. Usually, this is calculated via transactional data on how recently and how frequently they’ve visited the site, and the value of their purchases. However, it could also be a figure based on the characteristics of your customers. For example, small and medium-sized businesses have more value than home office workers do. Answering these questions about current site users will help you prioritize which customers you want most to retain and develop.

To further drive a site’s business value, you need to gather information about both online and offline customers, so you can decide which of them has the potential to become a more valuable online customer. You can then overlay the assessment of potential customer value onto the baseline view to more precisely define the customers you want to develop into valuable customers for the future.

The goals for current valuable offline users are to identify them and turn them into valuable online customers, which can enhance the business value of a site by reducing costs for processing transactions and providing customer service. The first step is to segment users into categories based on their value and their usage of the site.