Every Web site has a purpose. Yours may have more than one.
Your Web site is a collection of possible types of content and applications. The purpose of your site can be identified by thinking about your main business objectives and answering a couple of key questions:
- What are you trying to accomplish on the site?
- Why are customers coming to your website?
Let’s walk through a couple of examples. If your main goal is to achieve and maintain customer satisfaction, your site is likely a Support site. If however, your main objective is to enable the direct sale of products and services, then your site is likely a Commerce site.
Web Purposes will help those of you in the web space measure the business value of your activities vis-à-vis your business objectives and facilitate tracking of your site’s success metrics.
Review the following Web Purposes to see which apply to your Web site.
- Ad Revenue
- Commerce
- Community
- Extension of Product
- Marketing Communications
- Public Relations
- Self-Service / Support
- Subscription
Ad Revenue
Charging for online advertising
These sites charge advertisers to place ads or search results, and may also charge for content or for the views of visitors/readers who read the content.
Commerce
Selling products and services online
These sites serve as a distribution channel for products and services, driving the customer to a purchase.
Commerce sites can involve some of the following activities:
- Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
- Electronic Funds Transfer
- Supply Chain Management
Community
Strengthening customer relations
These sites serve as a channel for building and strengthening customer relations by enabling customer interaction and participation on the website.
Extension of Product
Extend offline products to online
These sites extend the features and functionality of your offline products and maintain relevancy for your products.
Marketing Communications
Marketing of products and services
These sites provide a way to market your products and services. MarCom includes relationship marketing and awareness vehicles across sites that impact lead generation and branding.
Public Relations
Providing general company information
These sites serve as a conduit for access to general company information such as press releases, product and customer news, management bios, media kits, and others.
Self-Service / Support
Providing support and service online
These sites provide support and service online to existing customers through support services, FAQs, knowledge bases, articles, white papers, and education.
Subscription
Providing subscription content
These sites serve as a channel for engaging customers at a deeper level and encouraging them to subscribe and consume subscription-only content.
Once you have a clear understanding of which web site purposes can be applied to your site it will help you with more clearly understanding how to gauge your sites success of achieving its purpose. I will try to explore in more detail the type of analytics that you would want to use for each type in some future posts.
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