Receiving a good return on investment is crucial for any business venture, but a recent report claims that 43% of SMEs have no methods in place whatsoever to measure how useful their website is in terms of generating sales; or to gauge how well their site is performing.

Considering the millions of pounds that are spent by small firms on web marketing per year, this statistic makes for alarming reading. Unlike most other forms of marketing, the success of a website can be monitored at every stage making it the most trackable and analytical business and marketing tool available.

So, what simple techniques can a small to medium sized business do to find out the effectiveness of its site? There are many low cost, easy options that can be employed to benchmark a site's performance.

• Having a clear call to action on the site will help you monetise the visits your site receives. It should be easy for customers to find and buy your product or services; sign up to your newsletter or request a brochure. A common mistake is to try and present too much
  Do some comparative research by running a Google search using the keywords and phrases relating to your business
  information on each page, which can result in a cluttered look that may put off a visitor and have a negative effect on conversion rates.

• Post a unique telephone number just for website customers. This simple, all too often forgotten action will instantly and simply indicate how many phone sales are coming your way via your website.

• Do some comparative research by running a Google search using the keywords and phrases relating to your business to see how yours performs against your competitors. When designing a site, create it with the search engines - especially Google - in mind. Try, for example, to include search words and phrases in you site's content, which is a basic search engine opimisation (SEO) technique. This will increase the chances of Google looking more favourably at your site and giving you an edge over many of your competitors. A good web designer should know how to implement SEO techniques, but always ask for references to back up any claims.

• Sign up with Google Analytics, which is a free web based tool that will measure your websites performance in terms of visitor behavioural data. Your eyes will be open to how your visitors behave when they visit the site, for example: Do they get past the first page? How can the site be improved with regards to the navigation? How many clicks does it take to buy the product? How many visitors to the site actually bought our product? What trends are there, for example is your site growing or losing visits each month? All types of online marketing can be tracked through Google analytics so you can see exactly what's working and what's not. If you are not tracking your online marketing you won't know where you are succeeding and what's not working.

• Remember to ask your customers about their online experience with you. If you don't have the opportunity to speak to your audience face to face, you can add a low cost, or even free, survey tool to your site to collect customer feedback. Testing your site out on friends and family to observe them while they navigate around it will give you first hand experience of how user-friendly the site is.

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