I have been approached by clients to build a web site, and when I ask about the website objectives they often tell me what their business objectives are. Let us first understand the difference between the two, or at least my perspective on both.
Business Objectives
Business objectives are tasks your business completes to satisfy your clients and make you money. Maybe you run a hair salon and you provide haircuts, or you own a restaurant and you sell meals to your patrons. What ever your business, the direct service or product you provide to someone.
Website Objectives
Website objectives, or what I refer to as “Digital Objectives” are tasks your website can perform to meet or compliment your business objectives. As you can tell we can not give hair cuts on the internet (well not yet anyway) but a digital objective like having that same client book an appointment over the web is possible. There are many different “digital tasks” people can perform on a website and some of them are:
- Download a brochure
- Watch a video
- Fill out a form
- Click a button
- Follow a link
- Scan a QR code
As you can see there are many “digital tasks” that a potential client can perform on your web site that will ultimately support your business objective. Realtors today are not selling homes online but they are having you browse through a catalog of homes, or scheduling appointments online, or asking you to submit your information for a call back and the successful ones are measuring those activities to find out what is working.
All activities should be monitored and tracked for success. Knowing who did and who did not do what is an important factor to understand both your conversion rate and investment.
