We were recently contacted by an individual who has a performance coaching business.
They had a question about their website stats that had been sent to them at the end of the month.
We have a professional relationship with this coach, so giving them some advice was not an issue at all.
Especially because all they wanted to know was what these stats were telling them.
Were the stats good?
Were they bad?
Did they matter at all?
I sat down to write the reply to this coach, and while writing, I thought it would be a good idea to put my answer out to the public so that anyone else who is confused about what their website stats are telling them can have their answer questioned as well.
The website stats for the previous month were as follows:
Visitors: 46 (53% increase)
Views: 83 (76% increase)
With regards to these website stats, we really want to look at the number of visitors, as opposed to the number of views.
The number of visitors indicates the number of unique individuals who visited your website in that timeframe, while the views just show how many times your website was reached.
As you would all understand, you might visit a website multiple times in the course of a single month.
Let’s say you visited your favourite news website 20 times last month, this would register in the stats as 1 visitor, 20 views.
When in the context of a business website, the natural way individuals tend to make decisions is by returning to a specific website, or page on a website, multiple times before taking a specific action.
This is why we would mostly ignore the “views” stat and look only at “visitors”.
In saying this, the number of visitors isn’t too significant, in the sense that your website won’t drive visitors to itself.
Your visitor numbers are only ever going to be as good as your marketing efforts to drive traffic to your website.
If you’re frustrated about low visitor numbers and looking to generate more visitors to the website, it has more to do with how you’re promoting the site and trying to drive traffic.
What’s far more important is how many of those visitors are taking the action you want them to when on your website (conversions).
The reason we initially place a much bigger focus on conversions than we do on website traffic is that you could send 1million+ visitors to your website each month, but if your website’s completely ineffective, you’re not going to see any good come out of it.
Basically, if your website’s not doing its job, it’s better to focus on this issue first, and then send traffic to a high-converting website later.
If the main purpose of your website is to get interested parties to fill out a form, the number of forms received in this time period is what you need to be tracking.
Based on the above website stats, if you got 40 forms with legitimate interest, your conversion rate would be 87%.
If you got 4 legitimate forms, your conversion rate would be 8.6%
The reason I make a point to say “legitimate forms” is because, as you would likely know, website contact forms can be very attractive to spammers, so it doesn’t make any sense at all to count the form submissions you receive that are not relevant to business enquiries.
Various industries have different conversion rate averages.
To find out what the average for your industry is, just type “website form conversion rates for (insert your industry here)” into Google, and you’ll be given a rough guide on what you should be aiming for as a minimum.
An average conversion rate for service websites is around 5%, which would mean that with the above visitor numbers, you should be aiming for at least 2-3 legitimate forms.
Once you know what your conversion rate is, you can work on increasing your website’s effectiveness through various methods.
If your conversion rate is lower than the industry average, I’d suggest reconfiguring your website to bring those numbers up.
Getting experts to redesign your website so that it is higher converting is your single most important task if this is where you find yourself and your business.
Do not leave this to chance.
As I said earlier, a website that isn’t doing its job with 46 monthly visitors isn’t going to do any better with 4,600 monthly visitors.
Often, when a website has a very low conversion rate, it can actually be doing more harm than good to your business, in the sense that it’s actively turning people away from contacting you.
This is not a task that you want to outsource to your favourite child, or your nephew’s girlfriend, to give them “experience”.
This is something that you need to have done right.
If your website is converting at rates higher than the industry average of 5% (or whatever the average is for your industry), I would recommend sending more targeted traffic to the website.
For example:
Based on your stats, and assuming you have a conversion rate of 8.7%;
If you increase your website traffic this month to 100 visitors, you’re going to get around 8-9 legitimate contact form submissions – doubling your interest from the previous month.
It’s the work around how to generate more traffic to your website, which can be the tricky part.
As a strategic marketing company, we would strongly recommend having a marketing strategy in place, as this would tell you exactly who you need to be getting to your website and exactly how to get them there.
But, for argument’s sake, if most of your target market is on LinkedIn, then post more content that’s relevant to your audience, and add a call to action at the bottom of each post, directing readers to your website.
We see too many people spending too much time and money trying to optimise a website that already converts more than enough of its visitors.
Likewise, and more commonly, we see businesses all of the time spending tens of thousands of dollars in an effort to drive as much traffic as possible to their website.
They do this without first understanding the best platform to do this on – most just start throwing money at SEO, because this is what worked 20 years ago – and secondly, they try and drive traffic to a website before understanding that it’s actually their website which is stopping people from getting in touch with them.
This process doesn’t need to be overcomplicated.
Step 1: Make sure your website converts at a minimum of your industry standard.
Step 2: Work to send as many people as possible FROM WITHIN YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE to your website
