What the Website Actually Produced

The question worth asking

Not whether traffic went up, and not whether the site looks better than it did.

How many jobs, over twelve months, came from it, and what were they worth.

That is answerable for most small businesses, approximately, and approximately is sufficient.

A business that has never asked it is running a marketing channel on faith, which is a reasonable position for a year and not for five.

What you need

• Jobs won, for the year.
• How each customer found you, as far as you know.
• Average job value.
• Rough gross margin.
• What the site cost, to build and to run.

The second is the one most businesses lack, and where it is missing the whole exercise becomes guesswork.

Which is the argument for asking every enquiry from now on, since this question arrives every December and is only answerable if somebody wrote things down.

Doing the arithmetic

Deliberately rough, since precision here is false.

Count the jobs attributed to the website, or to searching, or to finding you online, which are all the same thing for this purpose.

Multiply by average job value to get revenue, then by gross margin to get what it contributed.

Against that, the cost: hosting, the domain, any retainer, any advertising, and an amortised share of what the build cost.

The difference is the answer, and for most small businesses it is not close enough to require precision.

A worked example

A trade business doing this for the first time.

Of the jobs they could attribute, a meaningful number had come from people who found them by searching.

At their average value and margin, that contribution was several times the annual running cost of the site, including the amortised build.

Which settled a question that had been raised at every quiet period for three years.

What was more useful was the second finding: a further group of customers had been recommended and had then checked the website before phoning.

Those were not attributable to the site and the site had plainly been part of the decision, which changed how they thought about what it was for.

The site's other job

Worth accounting for separately, since it does not appear in any attribution.

A substantial proportion of people who are recommended a business look it up before making contact.

What they find either confirms the recommendation or undermines it.

Which means the site is doing work on enquiries that will always be attributed to word of mouth, and its absence would cost some of them.

That is real, unmeasurable, and worth stating rather than ignoring, because a purely attribution-based assessment undervalues the site systematically.

The honest form is: the site directly produced this much, and it also supported an unknown share of everything else.

When the answer is poor

What to conclude, since the arithmetic sometimes comes out badly.

First, check whether anybody could find it: whether it appears for the service and the town, and whether the listing is complete.

Then whether it converts what it gets: prices, phone number, form, service area.

A site producing nothing is usually failing at one of those two, and both are fixable.

What is rarely the answer is a redesign, since a site nobody finds looks equally good after being rebuilt.

The order is findable, then convincing, then attractive, and businesses reliably attempt them in reverse.

Comparing against the alternative

The comparison that makes the number meaningful, since a positive return is not automatically a good one.

The relevant question is not whether the site returned more than it cost, but whether it returned more than the same money would have elsewhere.

For a small business the realistic alternatives are advertising, a van wrap, printed material, or simply doing nothing and keeping the money.

Which frequently favours the site, since its running cost is low and its output continues without further spending.

What it argues against is the assumption that a larger investment would produce proportionally more, since most of the return comes from a handful of pages doing basic things well.

The counter-case

Where this calculation is not the right test.

A business whose site exists to be checked rather than to generate, such as one working entirely by referral, where the test is whether it supports the decision rather than starts it.

Anything in its first year, where search visibility has not accumulated and the figure will understate what it will do.

A site serving a compliance or informational purpose.

And a business too small for the numbers to mean anything, where three jobs either way changes the conclusion entirely.

What a poor year does not prove

Worth stating, since a single figure invites over-reading.

Twelve months is one observation, and for a business with modest volume it carries the same variation as any other small number.

A year with fewer attributed jobs may be a quiet year rather than a failing site, and a good year may be a good year rather than evidence anything worked.

Which is why the series matters more than the year, and why the first assessment is a baseline rather than a verdict.

Three years of the same calculation says something no single year can.

Writing it down

The part that makes next December easier.

One page: jobs attributed, revenue, margin, costs, and the resulting figure.

Plus two sentences on what changed during the year and what you think it did.

Kept alongside last year's, so that in three years there is a series rather than an impression.

That series is what answers questions no single year can, such as whether the improvement made in March was still working in November.

This December

1. Count jobs attributed to finding you online.
2. Multiply by value and margin.
3. Total what the site cost to run.
4. Compare.
5. Note what is not attributable but was probably supported.
6. Start asking every enquiry, if you have not been.

The sixth is the one that makes this exercise possible at all next year, and its absence is precisely why most businesses cannot do it this year.

An hour in December, repeated annually, replaces an argument that otherwise recurs at every quiet spell with a number.

How to keep that record is covered in counting enquiries instead of visits.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.