A B2B lead generation client recently asked me to help them perform a cost benefit analysis for a redesign project. In short they wanted to know if they invest $x to redesign their website, how and when will they recoup their investment. Since WebMetro designs custom websites from the ground up for maximum usability, conversion and SEO, I loved this question!
The first thing I did was look back over the past 12 months for websites we had redesigned. I gathered information from both B2B and B2C sites. I also gathered information from both lead generation and ecommerce for comparison purposes. I pulled data from both pre and post website redesigns. I examined their traffic, rankings, conversion rate, leads, sales and average order value for the ecommerce sites.
In the end I learned that our overall conversation rate increased 19.5%. Lead generation sites had an amazing 23.5% increase in conversion. Of course cost per lead decreased accordingly. Ecommerce sites conversion rates increased an average of 18%. Average order value for the ecommerce sites increased 17% and the number of transactions increased 38%.
NOTE: One ecommerce site had a 98% increase. Honestly, this site had a horrendous conversion rate before the redesign. Since this was a huge anomaly, I excluded this increase in my average conversion rate calculations.
After reviewing our recent redesign projects I researched and analyzed the client’s SEO campaign data. In 6 months the SEO campaign has had a 97% increase in search engine traffic and a 505% increase in organic keywords. The keywords are important for the long tail and also support Latent Semantic Indexing.
In order to calculate the breakeven point, I needed to make 2 assumptions: 1) what is the conversion rate increase and 2) how much will the traffic increase based on existing rankings.
For our calculations we used a conservative 5% increase conversion rate. Since the site is on page 2 for a few of its largest volume keywords, we believe that another 100% increase in traffic is very doable in 12 months.
With this data in hand, we calculated that the site will break even on the website redesign within 6 months or sooner. Even if traffic stays the same, the cost per lead would decrease which in turn will increase revenue and profit margins.
In the end, we had calculated how investing in a website redesign will improve the number of leads, the quality of leads, reduce the cost per lead, increase revenue and increase profit margins. This is the value of a good website redesign.