Your Website: How to Jazz Up Your Site

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By now, most companies have a website. But most companies probably aren't making the most of it. Indeed, according to a survey of Inc. readers, most companies--some 29 percent--update their sites very infrequently, on a quarterly basis if at all.

If your company is typical, then, you probably see your website as a nice profit center--a tributary of additional sales that requires relatively low upkeep. Reid Carr would view that as a failure. Carr, founder of Red Door Interactive, a San Diego firm that advises companies, including Intuit and Buck Knives, on their online initiatives, says his clients are frequently hamstrung by low (or no) expectations. "Companies don't see the Web as a true aspect of their business," he says. "They aren't benchmarking. They don't try to drive more revenue."

So how do you make sure your site is more than merely adequate? That can be tricky. Different website strategies are right for different kinds of companies, and a lot of buzzed-about applications are of dubious value. The good news is that you don't have to be a technologist to make smart decisions. But you do have to ask the right questions, including:

Is my site up to snuff?

Plenty of clues can be found in a standard Web analytics report, if you know where to look. Broadly, analytics is a category of software that allows companies to keep track of where customers come from and what they do on a site. The data should help you decide how to organize your site and can help you identify search-term ads that are likely to lead to sales. "Web analytics is like accounting for the Internet," Carr says. "Initially, it should be 100 percent of your online marketing budget."

The most sophisticated programs, offered by Omniture (NASDAQ:OMTR) and WebTrends, can cost thousands of dollars a month, but prices have been dropping, and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) even offers a good free tool.

Pay careful attention to your site's "bounce rate"--the percentage of visitors who leave your site without clicking even one page deeper into it. This measure varies by company, but a high or rising bounce rate is a sure sign that your homepage is boring or off-putting.

"Geotargeting" information can also be useful. It shows you where in the world (or in a given state) your customers are coming from. You can also use analytics to discover how many people bail out during the sales process at each stage (after reading a product description, as soon as you ask them for credit card information, etc.).

Where should I go for ideas?

The first step is to visit competitors' websites and see what they're doing differently from you. Then you'll want to know how many visitors they get a month and who those visitors are. Compete.com, Quantcast.com, and Alexa.com offer free data on hundreds of thousands of websites, including the number of visitors, the amount of time they spend on a site, and basic demographic information. These data are derived from a sample of Web users who agree to be tracked, so they are far from perfect. But they do give you a sense of basic trends: Is your rival's traffic trending up or down? Did it improve when that site added a video section? And how does that compare to the traffic bump you got from your past few blog postings?

Who should be in charge of my site?

"A lot of companies pawn off their Web presence on the youngest marketing guy in the room," says Carr. That's a bad idea: Your Web chief should be the CEO or someone else very senior, he says. This doesn't mean it's time to rush off and master HTML programming or start hanging out on MySpace--although neither could hurt--but it does mean that you need to take an active role in your site's development. Carr recommends creating a freestanding Internet division whose head reports directly to you.

How can I use my site to identify and cater to my very best customers?

In a perfect world, you would know exactly who was visiting your site, obtain those visitors' contact information, and have a salesperson follow up. That's not yet possible today, but there are a number of new services designed to help a small company customize its pitch. For example, Pardot, an Atlanta-based company, collects data about website visitors from a form they complete and from their click habits. It then cross-references visitors' IP addresses against the American Registry for Internet Numbers and listings from outfits like Dun & Bradstreet and assigns a letter grade to each visitor. An employee of an established company who clicks on things like pricing information or views information about your management team will get a higher grade than the average site visitor. Salespeople can then pursue the customers who appear to be the most likely to buy, either because of who they are or where they clicked on your site. The service starts at $150 a month.

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