Most luxury brands measure their digital return with the wrong unit. They look at what the site cost to build (€50k) and compare it to the revenue it directly generated. That is the fundamental error.
What a bad site really costs
Take a house spending €200k a year on press, events and social. All of it drives traffic to the website. If that site converts at 0.8% instead of 2.5% — the luxury benchmark — then 70% of the marketing investment simply evaporates.
Over a year that is tens, even hundreds of thousands of euros in lost revenue — never measured, never charged to the site.
The calculation nobody runs
- Monthly traffic: 8,000 visitors
- Current conversion rate: 0.8%
- Average order value: €1,200
- Current revenue: €76,800 a month
At a 2.5% conversion rate — what a serious rebuild achieves: €240,000 a month. Annual difference: €1.96 million.
The rebuild typically costs €50k for a brand of this kind. Return: forty-fold over twelve months.
Why this trade-off is so rarely made
Because the cost of the site sits on a visible capex line while the opportunity cost is invisible. Finance sees the studio’s invoice, not the monthly leak. Our job as an agency is to run that calculation for them, from the quote onwards.