We've all been there. Trying to plan for a new website. ROI can sometimes take a back seat to something frivolous if you're not focused. It's easy to get distracted but online goal setting for your website doesn't have to be this hard. It's a simple matter of identifying your business objective and tying it to a strategy and tactic. New website ROI can be tracked down to the penny, as long as you can tie your actions to your objectives. Today, Big Picture Web talks about the only three things you can do on your website: acquisition, engagement and conversion. Then I'll show you how to measure and improve these areas.

New Website ROI in Three Steps

When it comes down to it, you can only do three things on the Internet:

1. Acquire new visitors to your website or landing page
2. Engage visitors long enough to convey your  message about your ideas, products and services
3. Convert a portion of your visitors into subscribers, leads or customers

When making your new website, ROI goes up quickly once you limit your activities to only reflect these three core goals. Are you creating a new website and just starting your online goal setting? Perhaps your strategy will be to acquire new visitors and your tactic may be to use search engine optimization. Are you getting decent traffic but having trouble selling things on your website? Focus your efforts on tweaking conversion rates through making content more accessible or persuasive. Online goal setting will help you maximize new website ROI and focus on the strategies and tactics right for your business at the right time.

Online Goal Setting for your Website

Don't go it alone. There are excellent free tools to help you measure your new website's ROI. For example, Google Analytics allows you to view information on all website traffic coming your way. 4Q's simple user experience survey can provide incredible insights. These tools are powerful and excellent in helping you with your online goal setting. Avinash Kaushik, famous web analytics blogger and author, describes the importance of these types of analytics tools in his book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. He describes how the absence of a data-driven culture on your website team can lead to many arbitrary decisions that ultimately aren't any good for your website or your business. Online goal setting for your website becomes much easier when you can measure to improve your new website's ROI.

So there you have it. Focus your efforts in terms of acquisition, engagement, and conversion. Measure and improve your results for free. This approach will help you maximize your new website ROI and your online goal setting efforts for your website.