What Are We Getting From Our Website Marketing

Posted by Greg Frye

When someone tells me “we don’t know what we’re getting from our website”, it usually means that they can’t identify many new customers that resulted from a website visit. And they believe that their website should help them land a lot more sales than it does. Sound familiar? If you find yourself in this situation, what should you do?

If your website isn’t contributing to your bottom line, why not?

How many visitors are coming to your site? How does that compare with a year ago? What is the visitor trend? Could you get more prospects to visit the site?
Are they the right visitors, can they buy?
Are you getting visitors but you can’t turn them into customers?
Are you having issues with all of the above?

Let’s take a quick look at each individual area that might be contributing to poor website performance, starting with “are you getting enough visitors to your site?” For example, our clients’ monthly visitor numbers range from 1,000/month to over 30,000/month so there’s really no rule of thumb or average number of visitors for you to compare against. It varies both by industry and search visibility. But here are a few things to look to get a better idea of whether this is potentially a problem for your site:

What percentage of your visits are direct (typing in your URL directly or having it bookmarked)? If it’s over 50%, most of your visitors already know you and you’re not attracting new prospects.
What percentage of your visitors come from search engines? Many of our clients who have high search visibility report as high as 80% of their visits come from search engines. If your percentage of search visits is less than 30% you could probably be attracting a lot more prospects who are looking for your products or services on search engines which is where the majority of your prospects will start looking for new vendors.
How many visitors came to the site this quarter vs. last quarter? Is the visitor total from the first half of this year vs. the same time period last year, more, less? If your visitor numbers aren’t growing then that might be holding you back.

Maybe you’re getting visitors but can’t turn them into customers? Are they the right visitors? Let’s take a look at how a website visitor becomes a customer. For most clients, the visitor fills out a form on the site (contact us, request a quote, etc.) or gives you a call. While a few clients do track phone calls, most do not. So let’s look at form fills or emails (like info@abc.com). How many form fills/emails are you receiving each month? And do you consider these form fills legitimate prospects or are most trying to sell you something? If you have 1 out of 100 visitors who fill out one of your forms, that’s pretty average. If 1% or more of your visitors aren’t filling out your forms, you could have the following issues:

– the information on your site isn’t persuading your visitors to contact you

– your calls-to-action are not very effective or visible

– all of the above

And are the people filling out your forms legitimate buyers? Marginal prospects at best? Are a lot from overseas and you don’t export?

If you can’t get anyone to fill out your forms, and/or they’re not the right kind of prospect, you’re going to have a tough time closing them.

It takes expertise and time to figure out why companies are not getting more new business opportunities and sales from their website, but it can make a huge impact in your sales revenue when you do get it figured out. Are you ready to get started? If so, let’s talk.