Summary

As you saw in Chapter 5, every Web site has a goala purpose it was designed to fulfill. Most sites are designed to sell, to inform, to persuade, or some combination of all of them. In this chapter, we explored the various behavior models that apply to Web site visitors, and we showed how to measure what visitors do on your site.

We looked at several different versions of the Web Conversion Cycle model, each customized for a different Web site. We hope that you developed the appropriate model for your Web site, too. Throughout the rest of this book, we return to the Web Conversion Cycle concept at various points, identifying those passages with the icon shown here.

In this chapter, you also learned how to choose the right events to count (we call them Web conversions), and you now know how to translate those events into revenue dollars. More importantly, you know how to calculate the revenue value of each visitor who comes to your site, forming the basis of the business case of your search marketing campaign.

We are just getting started, however. In Chapter 7, we go beyond existing Web site measurements to a set of new metrics that help you move your organization where it needs to go. We start by assessing where your site stands today and show you the opportunity that you are missing. We build on the calculations we introduced in this chapter to show what search engine marketing is worth to your own Web site.

You probably know that "you get what you measure." In the next chapter, we show you how to track the measurements that prompt the behavior you want. So, say goodbye to generalities. No more theory. Let's put your site under the microscope.