We no longer live in a world where only last-touch direct response metrics suffice. The web influences both online and offline sales, every customer surveys competing sites and brands, they spend more time researching online and they research across multiple devices. This makes for a very convoluted purchase funnel. As people continue to browse constantly the amount of touchpoints before a purchase will continue to increase. So the question becomes how to quantify the value of all those touch points and create a strategy for growth?

Avinash has multiple great posts on this subject  micro-conversions, net income & goal values.  I’ve tried taking all of this in and meld together an approach to make all of these ideas work together. You should read Avinash’s posts first and then take a look at my conclusion. So I see three steps to putting together a strategy that values all the objectives of a website.

Step 1: Quantify All Actions Taken On The Site.

Look at all the micro-conversions that take place on the site and calculate their worth. This takes some creativity. You end up with something like this:

Step 2: Extrapolate Those Value Across All Channels

You’ve deduced how much a new email subscriber is worth, now multiply that value to the amount of email subscribers organic search has driven in the last week. Do this with each metric and each channel and you’ll end up with a report that encompasses the value that each channel has for each micro-conversion. This is a good looking weekly report to show how the site is doing overall. But where should you focus?

Step 3: Focus Strategy Going Forward Based On Categorization Of Micro-Conversions

At a very simplistic level most businesses work under a pretty basic premise: buy stuff at one price and then sell it for more than you bought it for. There are four main strategies to do this: price strategies – sell at a higher price, cost strategies – sell at the same price but lower your costs, market share strategies – take more customers from your competitors, & market size strategies –  go into new places where you haven’t sold before.
Divide your micro-conversions and other metrics that are important to your business into one of the four buckets.  Now if you want to focus your strategy on volume you know the micro-conversions and metrics that each marketing channel should be driving to.