If you’ve read our articles on B2B websites previously, you will know how against "simply beautiful” sites we are. B2B websites are the ultimate digital salesperson for your business and should be judged against revenue.
To drum this home, in the UK, the share of business-to-business (B2B) organisations' revenue share which came from digital channels increased from 33% in 2021, to 46% in 2023 and is set to increase to 56% in 2025. When over half of your total revenue this year will come from digital marketing, can you really afford not to be optimising your website?
Thought not - but what does website ROI even mean? How can you report on ROI? How can you see what customers originated from your B2B website?
We will answer all of these questions in this article, giving you the best tips to report more confidently on the revenue your website generates, and helping you ascertain, once and for all, the ROI of your B2B website.
Return on Investment (ROI) for a B2B website refers to the measurable value your website delivers to your business compared to the cost of building, maintaining, and marketing it.
It’s not just about traffic or design aesthetics - it’s about how effectively your site contributes to pipeline generation, sales conversion, and ultimately, revenue growth. Ultimately, you need to be measuring:
This is where a lot of B2B marketers go wrong with generating website ROI - they simply track the wrong metrics.
Yes, you should report on traffic growth and conversion rate. But it needs to be understood that these are simply indicators of success, not actual bottom-line success. This is because, truthfully, there’s not a huge correlation between metrics like traffic towards revenue, which ultimately should be the true KPI of any marketing campaign.
This is all well and good, but how can we put this into practice?
To measure website ROI, the simplest formula is:
ROI = [(Revenue Attributed to the Website – Total Website Costs) / Total Website Costs] x 100
But in practice, measuring ROI for B2B sites is more nuanced. This is because measuring ROI goes beyond simply how many contacts are generated through the website, but also:
Website costs can vary significantly depending on the specific needs and objectives of each business.
However, to provide a general benchmark, HubSpot reports that the average cost of a new B2B website for an SME typically falls between $15,000 (£11,500) and $80,000 (£61,000). For a website comprising around 50 to 60 pages, the investment is often in the region of £30,000 to £40,000.
This is important if you’re starting a website project and are looking to project results to get buy-in. By clearly linking investment to expected returns, whether that’s increased lead generation, improved conversion rates, better user experience, or reduced friction in the sales process, you can position your website not as a sunk cost but as a strategic growth asset.
That can be the difference between getting the green light and having your project stall.
We always recommend allowing 6 months to build a website. We break this down into four stages:
Although not wholly relevant to the topic of ROI, when planning to design and develop a new website, you need to have an idea of how long the process is going to take to be able to forecast ROI within a yearly period.
For example, if you know that a website development project will take 6 months to complete, and your sales cycle is 3 months, then you know you roughly have only a 3-month period to generate any sort of ROI within a single financial year. It’s important, therefore, to pitch your B2B website as an asset that generates ROI and revenue over time and forecasts results over 2 years, as opposed to 1.
To calculate the ROI on your website, you need to be tracking two metric types:
Let’s dive into each and what you should be measuring.
Fairly self-explanatory, but to accurately measure website ROI, you need to see literally how much revenue is generated from customers whose first touchpoint (that you can measure) is from your website.
This means tracking:
Tracking these metrics makes it a lot easier to track the overall ROI of your website. They enable you to not only see directly the number of customers who have originated from your website, but also the conversion rates of contacts to customers. For example, if your website generated 10 MQLS, but only 4 became an opportunity, and then only 1 of them became a customer, then you know your MQL-close rate is 10%.
This is what we call a split funnel analysis.
This enables you to have first-party data on your ‘next step’ conversion rates from MQL, to SAL, closed won/lost. When forecasting your website ROI, this will help you make more accurate predictions for how long it will take to see adequate returns and how many leads need to come through in order to see ROI.
Just to be clear, by no means are we saying you shouldn’t track performance indicators in order to see an ROI.
We just believe marketers spend more time trying to improve what are, in essence, vanity metrics over optimising things that actually affect the bottom line of the business. Positive indicators should be used to show progression, but should play second fiddle to revenue metrics.
Some positive indicators you could follow to show growth are:
So you know now what to look for when adjudging website ROI - but how can you forecast a return for your upcoming project? The first step is ascertaining how much and how long your project will take.
We’re going to create a fictional example to break this down. If you know your website project will cost £30,000 and last 6 months in total, that means you will have to generate £60,000 directly from your website to get a return of double.
If you know that the average lifetime value of your customers that originated from your website is around £5,000 total, the total number of customers that you will need to 2x your investment would be 12 (£60,000 ÷ £5,000 = 12).
Now, this is where your positive indicators can help you predict the overall revenue impact. Let's create some hypothetical figures here - let’s say:
From your existing website traffic of 1,000 visitors per month, you can expect:
This is a very rudimentary way of depicting website ROI, as, very often, B2B sales don’t happen as linearly as this example. But in order to project results and let leadership know when they can expect to see a return on their investment, and generate profit from your website project in both the long and short term.
To drive meaningful website ROI, your website should be created with the idea of enabling growth and driving sales for your business, not purely aesthetic reasons.
Here are our 6 best practices to maximise ROI from your B2B website:
Follow these best practices and you’ll be able to improve the ROI from your website in double quick time.
Hopefully, this article has helped you reframe how you view website ROI.
When over half of your revenue is projected to come through digital channels by the end of 2025, your website must be built and measured with revenue KPIS at the core. By focusing on outcomes like pipeline growth, lead quality, and closed-won deals, you can make stronger forecasting decisions and secure stakeholder buy-in a lot quicker.
If you’re planning a new website project and want to understand what kind of investment will support that kind of return, download our pricing guide, and we’ll help you plan your website with ROI in mind from day dot.