When you’re building your business, it can be easy to believe that the more traffic you get on your website, the more sales you will make. However, this is not always true.
Before you throw any more money in ads, paid referral traffic and other ways to increase your website traffic, read this piece first.
You will discover:
- Four examples of when more website traffic does not equal more sales
- Facts about the correlation between traffic and sales
- Questions to ask before working to increase your website traffic
- An example of what happens when you identify the best traffic channels
- An easy way to figure out how your current traffic is performing
If you are an online business owner, it is likely that one of your goals is to increase traffic to your website. It makes sense – more people visiting your website means greater potential for sales. However, many businesses and a lot of digital marketers make the mistake of thinking that increasing traffic will automatically result in increased sales.
Here are four examples when more traffic doesn’t equal more sales:
1. Not your ideal audience
You could have 1M visitors on your website and still see NO sales. How’s that possible? The answer is simple and your data is going to back it up. When you’re not addressing your ideal audience, your content, your offers and everything else simply fails to generate any sales.
If you look in your Google Analytics reports you should see short visits, high bounce rates, only a few or no visits to your contact/offers pages, little to zero people signing up for your email list, little traffic from organic searches (and that not even on your brand keywords).
We’ve all heard the saying that if you build it, they will come. In fact, many entrepreneurs and business owners have built their businesses on this principle alone. But if your content is not built to appeal to your ideal audience, then the more traffic you get, the less results you’re going to see.
Read more more about finding your ideal audience: 8 YouTube Videos On Identifying Your Ideal Customer
2. No offers
This goes without saying: no offers, no sales. Unfortunately, this is very frequently the primary cause of not converting traffic into sales. How could your website visitors buy it, if they can’t find it?
3. No clear funnel
A marketing funnel is a way of breaking down the customer journey in a clear path that simply takes your visitors by the hand and walks them through all the important milestones (awareness, interest, consideration, conversion). When you don’t have a clear plan in place for converting that traffic into leads or sales then all of those visitors are just costing you money and wasting time.
4. No nurturing
When you’ve got website traffic, you’re seeing lead conversion, but you’re not seeing sales, one of the reasons might just be a lack of nurturing. Just because someone gave you their information does not mean they’re 100% ready to give you their money, so that’s where nurturing comes in.
Nurturing means creating content that listens and attends to your audience’s needs, not yours. It means providing emails that focus on valuable, and useful content, and it is focused more on brand awareness and trust building rather than making a sale.
According to Marketo, on average, half of leads in any given system are not yet ready to buy , and MarketingSherpa reports that almost 80% of new leads never make a purchase at all.
With nurturing you have a good chance of changing that.
So, do you need more traffic to generate more sales?
Here are five facts to consider before deciding that you need to grow your website traffic
Fact: Traffic is important for SEO and to generate leads, but it’s not the only factor that impacts your bottom line
Fact: You need to have a conversion rate of at least 2% (or 20 visitors) in order to break even on advertising costs
Fact: Not all traffic is good (aka not everyone is ready to buy at the same time), so you need to improve the quality of your traffic to be able to increase your sales
Fact: The number of visitors to your website is only one factor that contributes to an increase in revenue
Fact: If you have a high conversion rate, then you will see increased sales even if the number of visitors is low
Important Questions To Ask About Your Website Traffic
Ask yourself these questions before investing your time and resources into generating more website traffic:
- Are you measuring traffic on your site?
- How frequently are you checking those metrics?
- Do you know how it has fluctuated over years or campaigns?
- Do you know your conversion rates?
- Do you know which traffic channels are generating prospects and sales?
The purpose is to figure out what is working and what isn’t. There’s no point in struggling to make 100 different traffic channels work, when all you need is to identify your top 3, focus on optimizing those, and only then adding more channels in your mix.
This business was struggling with this until it did this one thing
One of my clients, from the handmade retail market, decided to shift focus towards b2c after 2020 had her revise her entire marketing and sales strategy due to social distancing and many brick and mortar retailers closing or not receiving their normal foot traffic.
When we started working she was struggling to do it all, hoping that it would work on getting her more website traffic and more sales. The problem with that approach is that small businesses with small teams don’t have the luxury of a huge marketing department that handles traffic generation across organic, referral, multiple social channels, email, paid channels etc.
Trying to do so puts huge pressure and spreads their content efforts and marketing budget thin. It basically dilutes the brand, the pitch, and the message in to many directions.
So we started by figuring out what was working.
We looked at their Google Analytics and Shopify dashboard to discover which traffic sources are generating conversions, what was the conversion rate and how they compared with benchmarks. We also evaluated their available resources for generating more traffic.
Once we zeroed in on the best one and found ways to make the most of it, sales jumped through the roof and the brand hit records in transactions and revenue for their b2c market.
How your current traffic is performing
By now you should have realized that it is not the volume of traffic, but the quality. So it is important to figure out how your traffic channels are performing to make sure that your marketing strategies are focused on the right things.
To discover how your traffic looks like, you can use Google Analytics (over at analytics.google.com) to keep track of it. Under the Acquisition report choose Overview and you will get a dashboard showing you number of users, new users, sessions, bounce rate, pages per session, ecommerce conversion rate, transactions, revenue.
As you can see, in the example below, Direct is responsible for most of the traffic, while Organic Search and Email are the traffic channels that have the highest conversion rates.
Or maybe you’re spending time creating blog content, and your organic search is low, or not generating sales. This could show you that you’re not addressing your ideal audience with your keywords.
On the other hand, in the example below, organic search is generating traffic, but converts at a very low rate compared with email and referral, whereas direct and social are too small to make a dent.
The discussion can become very complex, but you can use this traffic overview to see if the channels you’ve been focusing your efforts have generated results, and how good those are. For instance, you could discover that you’re spending a lot of time on creating content for Facebook, which is generating traffic, but isn’t generating sales. Bounce rate is another important signal when figuring out your top performing traffic channels. A high bounce rate and short session duration could tell you that people coming from that specific traffic channel are not your ideal audience or are not properly warmed up to your brand, so when they land on your website they expect something else, are taken by surprise, and leave in a hurry.
When you struggle to grow your traffic by working 100 different channels at the same time, marketing and visibility really become a struggle. I’ve seen this overwhelm with many businesses and it’s a practice that needs to stop.
Revising your traffic challenges you to think differently about your business. Most entrepreneurs are stuck in their daily routines and never take the time to step back and look at their businesses from a bird’s eye view.
You don’t have to be alone in this. My mission is to empower entrepreneurs like you to create your own path towards freedom and prosperity by showing you what works today in order to scale your business tomorrow.
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