What is a GOOD number of website visitors per month?

This page in 19 seconds

You could skim quickly through this page about website visitors.

Or you could boost the success of your website if you read through the page in sequence, and click on some of the links and videos available.

Here’s what you’ll find within this page:

Assessing where you are in terms of website visitor numbers
Why people (incorrectly) obsess about website visitor numbers
The source data we use in our analysis
Insights into website visitor numbers by business sector
When website visitor numbers are too low
Why it’s important to remove junk from your overall number of website visitors
What actually matters about your website visitors. Spoiler: it’s not the overall number of visitors!

Let’s think about YOUR website visitor numbers

In theory, the more website visitors you have, the better.

What actually matters though is how many visitors make contact with you.

You could have 200 website visitors per month and 20% (40) of them become enquiries.

Or you could have 1,000 website visitors per month but only 4% (40) of them become enquiries.

Both websites have the same number of enquiries in a month but one has a much higher (5x) conversion rate because it resonates better with the website visitors.

Obviously, if you have very low numbers of website visitors, then you shouldn’t expect much from them, even if your conversion rate is strong.

But equally, if you have higher numbers of website visitors, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the right types of visitors, or that you website is strong enough to convert them to sales for you.

Forget numbers and think about increasing enquiries

As much of this page explains, there is no such thing as a recommended number of website visitors each month.

What matters is increasing the enquiries you get from the website visitors that you DO have!

Why it’s wrong to focus on overall numbers of website visitors

This video gives you an example of why it’s wrong to focus on overall website visitor numbers, but the rest of the page provides deeper information that will benefit you …

Before you move on

A1WebStats is dedicated to helping businesses succeed through websites.

We achieve this through our software and friendly advice.

We encourage moving away from obsessing about visitor numbers and into using website visitors data to make positive changes that will lead to more enquiries/sales.

If you choose to take our free 30 day trial, this is the summary of what will happen:

You install a piece of tracking code on your website (a two minute task for you or your web developer).
You will receive useful information about your website visitors (including names of companies that visited and what they looked at page by page).
We give you our 100% guaranteed no sales pitch. If you benefit from the trial we’re happy. If you choose to continue after the trial then great. But we never push sales of our product.
During your trial we offer a free screenshare/call, running through your data, showing you how to use the data to identify opportunities to gain more enquiries/sales from your website visitors. This includes showing you how to remove the irrelevant visitors so that you’ve got a useful view of your relevant website visitors.
At the end of your trial you have the option to continue using our software/getting our help (prices for most start from £70 per month if you have less than 3,000 website visitors per month). You can easily cancel that at any time – there is no contract.

To put that another way – it costs you nothing but a little bit of your time to get free insights into your website visitors during the 30 day trial.

Plus, if you’re more interested in the identifiable companies that visit your website, then our page http://a1webstats.com/what-it-does/visiting-companies/basic-reporting-on-visiting-companies/ includes videos that show you what you’ll receive. You may also be interested in this page that covers a lot more detail about the upsides and downsides of identifying companies that visit your website – http://a1webstats.com/what-it-does/visiting-companies/.

Now onto what you’re mainly interested in …

Why are website visitor numbers viewed as being so important?

Since websites have existed, people have believed that there’s a direct relationship between levels of website visitors and the level of success that can be achieved.

It’s a mindset that’s difficult to shift.

While there can sometimes be correlation between visitor numbers and actual business gained, it’s worth comparing these two hypothetical examples:

A business selling widgets has strong website traffic (2000 visitors per month) but both their marketing activities and website itself have weaknesses within them. The end result is that they gain 20 enquiries from their 2000 website visitors (1%).
Another business selling the same widgets has relatively low website traffic (500 visitors per month) but their website and marketing focus are much stronger. The end result is that they gain 20 enquiries from their 500 website visitors (4%).

In the examples above, the end result was the same – 20 enquiries each. The difference was that the website with the lower website visitor numbers had a stronger proposition/marketing and so benefited more from a lower number of website visitors.

Think this doesn’t happen?

It does, and we’ve seen hundreds of examples of where website quality wins over quantity of visitors to websites.

The data we use

We have access to visitors data from thousands of websites, via those who trial and buy A1WebStats.

This enables us to aggregate data from all those websites to bring you real data from real businesses.

That’s data that provides us with a view of typical numbers of website visitors per month, within broad business sectors.

Here are the numbers related to the data we use on this page:

Over 11 years of data collected
Visitors to 21,000+ websites included in the data
Websites belong to mostly small to medium sized businesses (although a few of our customers are larger businesses)
Staff at the businesses range from one person to large numbers. Typically, they are businesses with between 3 and 24 staff.

The websites analysed are from businesses in a wide variety of business sectors.

You’re probably interested in levels of website visitors for your particular industry …

Monthly numbers of website visitors by business sector

Below is a list of broad business sectors.

It may be easy to identify which sector your business fits into.

Or it may not be so easy.

It’s also relatively pointless, as we’ll explain after the list.

After each business sector category you’ll see the wide range of visitors we’ve seen from over 21,000 websites tracked over 11+ years).

Chemical (241 – 5,084 visitors per month)
Construction (152 – 4,128 visitors per month)
Consulting (98 – 2,131 visitors per month)
Energy (236 – 20,167 visitors per month)
Entertainment (136 – 1,019 visitors per month)
Financial Services (86 – 1,485 visitors per month)
Healthcare (292 – 6,890 visitors per month)
Hospitality (479 – 4,873 visitors per month)
Information Technology (247 – 1,845 visitors per month)
Insurance (136 – 3,828 visitors per month)
Legal (466 – 3,891 visitors per month)
Manufacturing (202 – 11,663 visitors per month)
Marketing & Advertising (113 – 12,630 visitors per month)
Property (225 – 2,478 visitors per month)
Recruitment (82 – 4,717 visitors per month)
Retail (46 – 10,326 visitors per month)
Software (141 – 16,784 visitors per month)
Telecommunications (157 – 3,428 visitors per month)
Training Courses (217 – 8,776 visitors per month)
Transport (394 – 3,178 visitors per month)

Taking our accumulated data, here’s an example of data that we have (averaged over 11 years), but will also be proven to be pointless …

The business sector of Software includes a wide variety of business types, each serving a varied market both domestically and internationally.

Our data shows (based on over 11 years of data) the following about 648 A1WebStats users in the software sector:

Lowest visitors per month: 141
Highest visitors per month: 16,784
Average visitors per month: 694

We know for a fact that the software business with the lowest visitors (141) in a month had the low traffic for these reasons:

Their software product was very niche, including only being sold in their own country, to a relatively small potential market.
They weren’t actively advertising their business online.

Compare that to the software business with the highest visitors (16,784) in a month, who can be best classified in this way:

Their software had a larger potential market, including international sales.
They were actively boosting their organic search engine rankings via new website content, plus were doing paid advertising.

In short, two different companies within one business sector (Software) but with very different types of businesses.

This means that it’s pointless to compare yourself against others in your sector.

Here’s another example, focusing on the Consulting sector …

Again, focused on the same 11+ years of data, here’s data related to 842 A1WebStats users in the consulting sector:

Lowest visitors per month: 98
Highest visitors per month: 2,131
Average visitors per month: 452

Again, the types of consultancy offered, and the target markets served, were very different between the consultancies that had the lowest and highest numbers of visitors.

Whatever sector you’re in, the numbers of visitors to your website, whether low or high, is mostly irrelevant and there is little value in comparing yourself to others within your sector, unless you’re directly comparing to other businesses that:

Offer the same types of service/product as you.
Target the same geographical area as you.

However, there is one general rule that applies to all businesses, regardless of the business sector …

When is website traffic TOO low?

The danger with too much focus on your overall number of website visitors is that you may gloss over the facts that actually matter. Further down you can see why not all traffic is useful but before that, a few words about low website traffic …

If your website is getting less than 400 visitors per month, then you are very likely to be missing out, while your competitors may be gaining.

However, we’re not suggesting that you drive more traffic to your website without careful consideration of the quality of that traffic, or how well that traffic converts to enquiries/business for you.

Instead, we’re saying that, based on thousands of discussions we’ve had with businesses that have lower levels of website traffic, under 400 visitors per month is not good.

There is typically a strong link between particularly low levels of website traffic, and limitations on the potential success of the business.

Having referred to particularly low traffic, it should be noted that the numbers of overall website visitors are not as important as understanding the usefulness of those visitors. We’ve seen websites that have strong traffic but 80%+ of that traffic would never become anything useful.

This is why …

Not all traffic is useful

One of the biggest dangers to businesses are some people who obsess about overall levels of website visitors each month.

Typically, these people are in senior management positions, who need to be enlightened about what actually matters.

Here’s an example of what matters …

You have 1,000 website visitors in a month.

Some businesses (incorrectly) compare the number of enquiries/sales gained to the overall number of website visitors.

Out of those 1,000 visitors, some of these may be of no practical value to you. Here are some examples:

Visitors from outside the geographical areas your business deals with (such as visitors from other countries)
Competitors and suppliers (A1WebStats can help you to identify those and exclude them from your useful visitors numbers)
Internal visits (staff either at your location or accessing from other locations, such as at home)
Bots (automated spider visits to your website that are not actual people)
Existing customers/contacts who you may be interested in, but (for example) they may just access your website to get contact details or to log in to something (so they’re not new potential customers).
‘Noise’ search engine sourced traffic – for example, you have a blog or image on your website that is accidentally bringing in the ‘wrong’ types of people. Those people have searched Google for something, seen a result that links to your website, but they’re not actually interested in what you have to offer.

When you take the above into consideration and remove them from the 1,000 total visitors, your POTENTIALLY USEFUL visitors number decreases significantly.

So, instead of comparing your level of enquiries/sales to the overall 1,000 visitors, you’re now comparing it to a lower number (e.g. 500 visitors).

How do you get to the point where you’ve eliminated the irrelevant visitors so that you’ve got a true picture of your potentially useful website visitors in a month?

Here are two options:

Go to our website section http://a1webstats.com/what-it-does/more-business/ with a mindset of focusing on products/services that you want more enquiries about. Then follow the guidance within the sub-pages, which will lead you to the number of potentially useful visitors and also some solutions to gain more enquiries from those visitors.
Don’t spend time on the pages/videos and instead sign up for our free 30 day trial. Then we can take you through how to get to the true number of useful visitors to your website each month after some data has collected (normally, two weeks worth of data). We promise no sales pitch – just useful advice within your free trial.

You may also like to read on to a very important subject …

What actually matters about your website visitors?

Forget overall website visitor numbers – it’s not data that you can use as meaningful statistics. If anyone in your business is insisting on focusing on overall website visitor numbers then you have a choice of:

Gently enlightening them via deeper analysis of your website visitors so that you remove the irrelevant data.
Shoot them/run them over in the car park/poison their coffee so that they’re no longer able to endanger the success of the business.
Move job.

What actually matters about your website visitors is one simple thing:

What percentage of USEFUL visitors bought from you or made an enquiry?

USEFUL means: the visitors that were left after you’ve eliminated the noise.

Websites can be big – you may have multiple services or products that you offer and it can be daunting knowing where to start.

We recommend that you adopt this process (which the A1WebStats system can help you with):

Identify just one product/service that you want more enquiries about.
Pull out data showing every visitor who got to that product/service part of your website during a month.
Weed out the irrelevant visitors.
Compare what’s left (potentially useful visitors) to the levels of enquiries/sales gained about that product or service. Ideally, express that as a percentage (e.g. 2% of 100 visitors made contact after going to your product/service page).
Based on what the data is showing you, strengthen your product/service page(s) and any supporting pages so that more visitors have enough reason to make contact with you and not one of your competitors.

You can see more details of the precise process to go through (using the A1WebStats free trial) via this page: http://a1webstats.com/what-it-does/more-business/.

Or, for an easier life, just sign up for our free 30 day trial and let us take you through how to get to focus on the useful visitors to your product/service pages, and guide you towards how to increase your success levels. That’s all for free, with no sales pitch – just useful advice within your free trial.

Finally – it’s all about YOUR business

Taking all the above into consideration, you may still be wondering what’s a good number of website visitors per month within your industry.

Although confidentiality means that we can’t give examples of specific companies within your industry, we CAN provide a general oversight so that you can compare that typical number of visitors to what you’re currently getting. If you share your website address with us, it’s very likely that we’ll also provide some free advice about how to gain more enquiries/sales for your business.

If you take the free trial of A1WebStats, you’d get the above and a lot more within the trial itself. However, if you just want some general insights then please do email us at hello@a1webstats.com with:

A subject line of ‘How many visitors?’.
Your email text containing your business sector and (optionally) your website address.

Within a few days we’ll email you back with insights that will be useful to you.

Thank you for reading – we hope that you’ve gained value from our experience of what makes a website successful.