Visitor traffic is the life blood of any web site - knowing the average revenue each visitor produces is the business intelligence that separates a profitable web site from the dot-bomb catastrophe that happened years ago. Yet many businesses do not dedicate resources to determining this value.

Just because a web site is does not have a shopping cart and items available for purchase does not mean a visitor value is non-existent. If time has been taken to clarify what the call to action for a web page, then a value can be associated with the cost for accomplishing the action. The challenge for most small business owners is actually taking the time to mine the data and come up with the value.

For example: Web sites used for lead generation often capture a name and email address of a qualified visitor. If your business were to buy email leads, you would have a cost per lead. For discussion, let’s consider a simple e-commerce site that allows visitors to make a purchase:

• For every 100 visitors, 3 make purchases
• Those 3 purchases average a $50 per sale
• Of that $50, $15 is profit (that’s $45 profit per 100 visitors)
• The average value per visitor is $45/100 or $0.45

That means the business can spend an average of $0.44 to attract one new visitor, and still make a profit. (Barely a profit, but still a enough to cover the bills and have $0.01 left over). That’s a simplistic example with all the business costs being known for what really is considered a “profit” for each sale.

And it would only make sense to keep attracting new visitors with marketing dollars if they converted into profitable customers with an acceptable return on investment. Otherwise, it’s driving the business into the poor house. That was the problem with the dot-bomb euphoria, no one was counting the marketing costs and verifying there was an acceptable ROI. Companies burned through their investor’s cash and closed shop.

With Google analytics or other tools, the value per visitor can at least be estimated. Otherwise, the online marketing budget becomes this big question mark - is it working or not? Does anyone in-house know? Should the marketing dollars be spent somewhere else?

For business owners who don’t want to get into the details, get with someone you trust to help you out. Don’t let your marketing dollars go to waste, make your online resources increase your bottom line.