PERFORM YOUR OWN ONLINE ACTIVITIES ASSESSMENT!

Below are questions that you may have asked yourself, or that you may have heard from your Web agency. They are part of a crucial process, because you can only manage what you can measure and evaluate! The present level of maturity achieved on the Web makes it possible to have concrete expectations, regarding specific business results. However, competition is fierce, and the standards, high.

This test is designed to help you identify your online activities' main strengths and weaknesses.

Objectives and strategies

• What is the main objective we want to attain with our website?
• With which strategic corporate objective is it linked?
• What is our Web site's main target audience (e. g. customers, prospecti, suppliers, partners, shareholders, investors, general public, special interest groups, etc.)?
• Are the contents up to date and well adapted to the target audience (or target audiences)?
• What do we want visitors to do, during or after their visit (e. g. find information, fill a form, download a form, buy a product, order a service, register for newsletter, request information, contact us by email or phone, etc.) ?
• Do we have the tools to measure these actions?
• How does our site compare with those of our direct competitors?
• How does it perform, regarding our objectives (if applicable)?

Tactics and operations: data, measurements, updates

• Do we have measurement tools that tell us how many people visit our Web site, where are the visitors coming from?
• Do we have any data concerning visitors' behavior (e. g. duration of visits, pages visited-or not, in what order, search engines and key words used to arrive to our site, etc.)?
• Do we have tools that tell us if visitors do what we hope they will do?
• Do we know what our "bounce rate" is (the percentage of visitors who enter the home page and leave without viewing another page)?
• Do we know what our "conversion rate" is (the percentage of visitors who perform an action, e. g. fill a form, finalize a transaction, subscribe to the site or to a newsletter, complete a transaction, etc.)?
• Did we try to optimize our referencing (ease with which search engines find our site and its position on the results page)?
• Did we consider paid referencing?
• Is it easy to modify the contents of the site? How much time does it take? How often do we have to perform updates?
• Do we measure the qualité of our online customer services (e. g. the speed of treatment of the requests)?
• Do we have a good security level (e. g. protection of personal data)?
• Do we have an emergency plan, in case...?
• Does our site conform to established standards (e.g. W3C)?
• Does it integrate one or more of the following Web tools: Blogs - Forums - Ipod - Audio/Video Sources - Wiki - RSS - Social Networks?

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