Suppose Your Web Site Has No Sales?

You’ve just been given the job to head a Web site that is generating no sales whatever. What’s your first step?

  • Ensure that you are capturing conversion and other metrics from your customers.
  • Fire the poorly-performing members of the Web team.
  • Commission a visual redesign of the Web site.
  • Create a customer survey and a series of focus groups to find out what your customers think of your Web site.

Your first job is to establish the right environment for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Without knowing what customers see, what they click on, and how often they convert, there is no way to know what to try next (and no way to know if that change made things better or worse). It might feel good to fire the Web team or to redesign the site, but without metrics, you won’t know whether those actions improved anything. And don’t retreat into a survey—what customers say should not carry as much weight in this situation as what they do. Start by counting that. Learn more about the most important Web metrics to track.