Your website is the orchestration layer

What it’s actually for

Most businesses I audit have spent more in the last three years redesigning their website than understanding the people who visit it. The new site is lovely. The analytics still can’t say who came, what stage they were in, or what they did next. #awkward

The website is not a channel like the others, and treating it as one is where the confusion starts. Every other row on the marcomms map sends; the website receives. Paid social, search, email, PR, events — every channel’s click lands here, which makes the site the orchestration layer: the place where traffic gets identified, profiled, moved a stage, or wasted.

That last word is doing real work. A click that bounces unprofiled is spend with nothing to show for it, and it happens at the website, not at the channel that bought the click. When paid performance looks broken, the account is the first suspect and the landing experience is usually the culprit.

Where it fires

The website → every stage, owned mode throughout; it earns its keep at Sizes up and Uses.

An owned channel.

On the marcomms map, the website is the rare row that fires at every stage — owned mode throughout — but it earns its keep at two. At Sizes up, it is the comparison venue: the pricing page, the proof, the case studies, the “can I trust these people” sniff test happening at 11pm without you. At Uses, it is where customers serve themselves: documentation, onboarding, support, the unglamorous content that quietly defends renewal.

The numbers that matter

Activity metrics: traffic, sessions, time on page. Mostly decoration. The numbers with a job: non-bounced traffic by source (which channels send people who stay), profiling depth (what do we now know about this visitor that we didn’t), micro conversions (the guide downloaded, the pricing page reached, the calculator used), macro conversions (the call booked, the trial started), and cost per conversion by channel. That last one is the line that makes every other row on the map accountable.

A website that can’t profile its visitors is a shop where the staff are blindfolded. Footfall is fine. Nobody knows what anyone wanted.

When not to use it

Or rather, the misuse patterns. Redesign as strategy: an unprofiled site with a new lick of paint is still an ugly pig in Viva Glam lipstick. Brochure thinking: a site that only describes you serves stage 03 and abandons the other seven. And traffic worship — celebrating sessions while the profiling, conversion and stage-movement numbers stay unexamined is vanity metrics with a hosting bill.

One row of twenty

This is one row of the marcomms map: every channel, every stage, every targeting mode, on one page.

The full system lives on the Methodology page.