Many website owners don’t understand the real value of improving their conversion rate.  Here are the marketing figures for a company who sell cosmetics online:

PPC Campaign 2009

The campaign began in January, so hopefully you can forgive the poor performance initially.  The company also have an SEO and a banner campaign for which I have estimated profits.  Over a 2 year period, the company profits from online activity may (with my estimations for the other 2 campaigns) look like this:

What would have happened if they had started the campaign with 12 months of website optimisation too?

Let’s assume the cost of development is £1000 per month and the agency fee is £1500 for research, design and implementation.  The work will increase the conversion rate of the website by an estimated 0.05% per month, which doesn’t sound like a great deal and would be perfectly achievable for this website which has never been optimised.  Here are the stats for 2009 with optimisation and 2010 without any further website optimisation:

PPC Campaign 2009 & 2010 with Website Optimization During 2009

In 2009, the extra profit from the conversion rate increase covers the cost of the work, leaving the profits the same as without optimisation.  However, in 2010 the campaign profit is suddenly doubled since they are no longer paying for optimisation, but still reaping the benefits of the work in 2009!

Even better, let’s look at the change to all media ROI:

Or if you want to look at it another way, here is the ROI of the website optimisation:

In this case, website optimisation has a higher return on investment than any of the media spend – so what are you waiting for??