How to Measure Your Website’s ROI

Here at Fisherman, we understand that every purchase that a restaurant owner makes needs to have a proven return on investment. Because it’s not worth spending money on something that isn’t ultimately helping you to make more money. 

A website is a necessary investment, but without setting goals and measuring the ROI of your website, you won’t know if you’re pulling in minnows or have a big catch. The best way to start seeing who you're bringing in each day is to start paying attention to the consumer usage data on your website. This data looks at:

• How many users visit your website a day
• What devices they are viewing it from
• What pages are most popular 
• What actions they are taking 
• Where are users visiting your website from (i.e. organic search, social media, direct link) 

Consumer usage data captures these key metrics and so much more. Learning to read the data can help you see what information your users are interested in or what information may be missing. Knowing this can help you make changes to your website that will bring in and engage more customers. 

Most websites have a basic analytics dashboard, but there are also free tools, such as Google Analytics, that you can sign up with to help you track, analyze, and make decisions based on your website data. 

It’s important to look at your mobile and desktop analytics separately since website designs can often be different between device types. You may find customers can easily order via desktop but have no idea why you see so few mobile device sales. Upon a closer look, you realize the ‘Order Now’ button is hidden on mobile for Android users, reducing a significant amount of potential sales! 

While you may notice fewer online orders coming in than you had hoped, without the additional insight provided from mobile device data you could spend money to make changes that don’t resolve the problem.

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Other Website Goals to Keep in Mind

Measuring your website’s ROI by total conversions is a great goal to start with, but you shouldn’t stop there. Analytics tools can help you set up a variety of goals that will help you understand the health of your website and your customers. Other metrics to keep in mind include: 

• How many of your website visitors are unique vs. returning
• How much time they are spending on your website 
• What content/information are they most interested in 
• How many users submit a contact form or newsletter subscription
• What buttons or images they're clicking on the site 
• What percent of visitors convert to paying customers 

This last goal is key! If you have 100 visitors, but only 2% of them convert to a paying customer you may need to evaluate the website layout or what your calls to action are. Don’t be discouraged if your goals are not met in the first month, website analytics and tracking goals take time and iteration to get it to where you want it to be. 

Track your goals month over month so you can measure your progress and get a better picture as to if there is a positive trend or if changes should be made. Ideally, you can survey your customers as they visit your business to get a rough measurement for percent of website visitors that end up becoming dine-in or online ordering customers.

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Start Growing Revenue Today

If you don’t have a website, creating one today is the best way to add a revenue stream to your restaurant business. Fisherman can provide a fully-optimized website in no time. We track your website’s visitor activity and provide super simple, digestible analytics reports so you can understand your consumer’s needs. 

We also understand that many business owners don’t have time to analyze the results or may not know what to do with the results, so we go the extra mile and help make decisions for you. We measure analytics across all of our customer websites, so we can learn more about what works and what doesn’t work, providing you with industry-wide data.

This industry data informs us when to make website design changes, add new feature sections or update the call to action. Think of us as your personal marketing and analytics team. Casting a wide analytics net so we can bring you the biggest catch. 

A website has a huge return on investment for your business, and you don’t need to pay agency prices to get started. Request a preview website today and see how you can start selling online!

Get a Website

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