11-26-2014, 05:18 PM
Almost websites are built to get visitors and get value from them (value maybe money, information, or anything that websites’ owners want to get. In this article, I assume that your website is selling something, so the value is money). Therefore, after building a website, we must do anything to get (right) traffic to visit our websites as many as possible. There’s some free ways to do that, and there’s paid ways too. However, did you ever ask yourself how much money you saved by getting a free visitor? Or does your money paid for a visitor worth it? Let’s answer these questions by calculating a visitor’s value to compare it with your spending to get it.
There’s NO FREE visitors
In my opinion, there’s no such thing as free visitors. You may think that you don’t have to pay money for them, but in that case, you must spend time, and your time is money, your effort is money. So, in both “free” or paid ways to get traffic, you should count time and effort as cost. And you should estimate their value. How to calculate it? I am not an expert in this field, but I can suggest you the easiest way to do that. How is your salary if you go for a job, or how much money did you get from your last job? Divide it to know how much your effort in 1 hour worth. Now you know how much money did you spend on some works that take 2 hours to do, right? In case you hire someone to do the job, the value should be their salary.
A_visitor_cost = salary + …
Cost-per-Click
Actually, there are many ways to charge your money to get visitors, but to keep it simple, I think we should choose CPC because it is easy to understand. You can easily convert any kind of cost to cpc. If you use “free” ways to get visitors, CPC should be zero.
A_visitor_cost = salary + CPC
Value of an order
As I said, I assume that your website is selling somethings, so that your value is how much money could you get from an order, in average. I think this number is quite easy to calculate, just sum up all your orders’ value and divide it to the amount of orders. The result will be more real if the amount of orders is greater and the time range of those orders is wider.
A_visitor_value = order_value + …
Considering conversion rate
But wait, there’s something wrong here. Not evey visitor would turn into your real customer. Almost of them just visit your website then leave. A small percent will turn into your real customer by buying your products or service. That percentage is called Conversion rate (CVR). I assume that in average, you have 100 visitors and have 2 orders, so your website’s conversion rate is 2%.
A_visitor_value = order_value * CVR + …
Cross-device conversion
Nowadays, a persion usually uses more than one device to connect to the Internet. Almost of us have at least 2 devices, a computer and a smartphone. And there are may cases that we look for some products or service by one device but we come back to buy it by other devices. This kind of case happens more frequent than you think, and you should bring it into our upcoming formula here. This index is not easy to know and it depends on your field also. However, some advertising tools do support tracking it, such as Google AdWords, and you could use it for a period of time to know the number, or if you are already using it, so let go find out that number.
A_visitor_value = order_value * CVR + cross_device_value + ...
Multi-buying
When someone turn into your real customer, there is chance that they would go buy again (it depends on you of course). The could buy the same product as before, or others. You should calculate or estimate the value of orders that one customer could by in lifetime.
A_visitor_value = order_value * CVR + cross_device_value + multi_buy_value + …
Referencer
Your products and service is excellence, customers love using it and they will introduce to your relatives and friends. You just pay for one customer but get more. You will find this value is hard to calculate or estimate if you do not have a good process to gather information. But in any case, do not forget this value.
A_visitor_value = order_value * CVR + cross_device_value + multi_buy_value + reference_value + …
Offline
If you have a hotline or real store, there is chance that people visit your website but do not buy anything. They make a call or visit your store to buy instead. This kind of value is the most difficult one to calculate because there is no tool to support you. You should build your own ways to estimate it.
A_visitor_value = order_value * CVR + cross_device_value + multi_buy_value + reference_value + offline_order
Comparison
OK. We have finished building formula to calcualte a visitor’s value and how much cost we pay for it. It’s time to compare
Received_value = A_visitor_value – A_visitor_cost
Your received value is positive or negative, or equal zero :D Leave your comment below to discuss.
Source: http://blog.stormcart.in/how-much-websit...tor-worth/