Lani and I are in beautiful New Paltz, NY, now at the end of three wonderful days spent with Guido Orio and Eve Orio of Golden Summit, experts in online, film, and video content. The professional (and personal) relationship was cemented a way back in 2001, when Lani, Eve, and Orio worked at Mattel, and though we’re now on different coasts, we’ve still maintained a great friendship with them.
It just so happened they were at a wedding not too far from here, and heck, when being 3,000 miles apart is suddenly reduced to 300, you can’t miss an opportunity like that. 
Of course, we’ve been catching up a lot (and watching our older son and their daughter play together like old friends, too, and not kids that last saw each other two years ago as toddlers), we’ve been talking a bit about return on investment (ROI) on websites.
It’s one thing if you sell physical product on your site – you can make the calculation pretty easily: Add up your costs (hosting, design, programming, maintenance), and divide it into your sales.
But what if you don’t? What if you can’t cleanly tie your website to your bottom line? Stonyfield Yogurt “CE-Yo” Gary Hirshberg addressed this in an interview with Business Week about the Stonyfield blogging effort:
Q: What are you getting from this, really?
Hirshberg: It’s impossible to say what we’re getting. But if you press an ad agency really hard about their best ads, their best copy, and ask them to prove that that ad resulted in an increase in sales, it’s the rare case when you can spell out cause and effect.But what I know in my gut from 22 years of doing this is that we have an emotional connection with customers. That helps explain why we’re growing at four times category rate in some markets and three times the category rate nationally.
What he’s talking about is essentially the same as “goodwill” – that part of a company’s stock market value not attributable to earnings or investments. Some of your company’s revenues are coming solely as a result of your brand’s value, which exists only in the mind of your customers.
Get your head around that on an early Thursday morning! So here’s the takeaway – if you have a website, but it doesn’t directly produce revenue, then add it to one more marketing category – branding.
Any sales you can’t attribute to directly to a specific PR or marketing effort have to be considered the result of branding – and at least partially due to your website.
Try it, and let us know if that makes the picture clearer for you!
