How much traffic do you get to your website each month?
Let’s see what you would gain by having more traffic …
If you gain more traffic to your website then you should (in theory) gain proportionally more enquiries/sales than you previously had.
If you had 500 visitors and they resulted in 5 enquiries then it’s fairly safe to assume that 1,000 of the same types of visitors will give you 10 enquiries. But how much of a ‘result’ is that? It’s a 1% conversion rate, which is very weak.
Yes, you could keep increasing traffic to your website and keep getting that 1% conversion rate, which brings you more business, BUT think about the effort and expense it takes to get that extra traffic and compare that to …
Let’s say you have 1,000 visitors per month, having invested in getting more of the same types of traffic to your website. Your visitors to enquiries rate is 1%
Let’s also say that a competitor of yours also has 1,000 visitors per month. However, their conversion rate is 2% because they’ve invested more time and resources in making their website stronger.
This makes your competitor the long-term winner because all the time you’re focusing on just generating more traffic to your website, your competitor is focusing on raising their conversion rate.
In short, if your conversion rate is 1% and your competitors conversion rate is 3% then they only need a third of the traffic that you need in order to get the same number of enquiries.
If you’re thinking “I can’t be bothered to put effort into my website so that it converts traffic to enquiries at a stronger rate!” then here’s a message for you:
Stop being stupid!
That’s right – stupid. Only a stupid person would favour increasing website traffic over increasing a poor conversion rate into a good one. If this is you, then please do stop reading now.
You only need a basic website analytics system to see your important numbers each month. Those numbers are:
Even at the most basic level, taking your overall website visitor numbers and comparing those to the number of enquiries that you’ve gained in a month (where you believe your website played a part in attracting the enquiries), will give you a percentage conversion rate.
You can of course dig deeper to work out the number of potentially useful website visitors (e.g. eliminating those from other countries, competitors, and more), which is where systems like A1WebStats become useful. However, to start with, it’s the important numbers that should be focused on before considering raising levels of traffic to your website.
This is a huge subject and there are limitless ways in which you can increase conversions from your existing levels of website traffic. The starting point should ideally be in analysing your biggest numbers. For example, which product or service are most people looking at on your website, and what could be stopping them from making contact with you?
If you’ve worked out your visitors to enquiries conversion rate and the percentage looks weak, but you can’t work out why, feel free to contact us – we’ll be happy to help identify opportunities for beneficial change within your website.
It’s not always stupid to have too much focus on driving traffic to a website. A couple of exceptions are:
Array ( [0] => 52 [1] => 49 [2] => 51 )
Leave a Reply