How we actually get results (customers) from websites... and what to do if you don't

So you have a website that may be under-performing. It can be extremely frustrating, regardless of whether you spent a ton of money or a ton of time building it.

I'm sure at this point you already believe the design and content are good and there should be no reason that people aren't picking up the phone or submitting your contact form... if you know there are issues, you obviously need to go fix those first.

Areas to Audit

There are a few main factors that play into a website actually churning out leads, here's the areas we're going to look at:

1. Traffic volume - First, is anyone even coming to the site?

2. User Experience - Can people find what they are looking for, and use the site effectively?

3. Offer - Are you providing a valuable reason to contact you or take action?

4. Trust and Reputation - Are you providing enough proof? Do you look trustworthy? 

I know this may all seem obvious, but the reality is if you're staring at your website and it's not getting any leads, you have an issue with at least one of these 4 things... there's no way around it. Sometimes the best idea is to just keep those 4 thoughts in your head and do a quick sweep of your site - something may pop out at you that was overlooked during the mind numbing process of writing all of your content and putting the site together. Sometimes you just need to ask someone else to do this audit, because you're too close to your business, materials and the effort you've invested.

Traffic

First, let's assume you have a nice website with a solid offer... is anyone visiting it?

I found, with my clients over the years, that many will believe that because they can Google themselves and they've posted their website link in a few places, that they should be getting high quality traffic - or that because their analytics software says they are getting some hits, that this traffic should be converting... we need to start by breaking down who's coming to your site and why.

Analytics

If you don't have any kind of traffic tracking system in place, such as Google Analytics, I highly recommend that you take the time to get that installed before going any further. You can often look at logs from your web host to see traffic, but you'll get a lot better information out of a proper tracking platform.

When you jump into analytics, you'll notice 2 main metrics:

1. Users - these are the unique people (as best as Google can guess) that are coming to your site

2. Sessions - these are the number of times your site has been loaded, including by the same users

If you're seeing low or no 'users,' then nobody is really visiting your site, and you definitely have a traffic problem.

If you are seeing a high number of users you'll want to answer a few more questions:

If you look at your audience overview, you'll be able to answer:

- What is your average session duration? If it's only a few seconds, it means you site isn't grabbing your visitor's attention, or it isn't loading properly

- What is the bounce rate? If its really high (over 80%) then, again, it means your site isn't grabbing your visitor's attention, or it isn't loading properly

- What percent of your traffic is mobile? If you have a high bounce rate or low session time, combined with a high mobile percentage, then it could be that your site displays or performs poorly on mobile devices. 

- Where are your visitors from? If the majority of your visitors are from your target countries/regions, speaking your target language, then great... if not, then you aren't really getting targeted traffic, and you should dig into the sources of your low quality traffic and continue knowing that you need to increase your target traffic.

If you at your acquisition overview, you should be able to answer:

- What percent of traffic is coming from your different online efforts - organic search, email, paid search, social, etc.

- If you are tagging your external links with UTM tags, like you should, then you'll also be able to determine which traffic sources are driving traffic and whether or not that traffic source is providing high quality visitors (what's their bounce rate, average session time, etc?)

- If you're finding your traffic is coming from 'unknown' you probably need to start tagging your external links

- If you're finding your traffic is coming from organic search, the keywords are mostly your brand name, and the traffic is bouncing or leaving quickly then it could be:

- Your site is too salesy and doesn't serve a solid purpose for people who already know you

- Your competitors or friends/family are the ones visiting your site and it has no value

- You need to work on driving traffic from more sources and creating content that search engines can use to determine the proper context under which to drive relevant traffic to your site

If you are seeing high volumes of traffic, with low bounce rates and high session timing then likely the issue is offer or proof related rather than the traffic itself.

Fixing a Lack of Traffic

Before you start off on a mission to drive traffic to your site, make sure everything else checks out. Spending money, or time and effort driving traffic to a site that isn't optimized for the other 3 factors I listed (user experience, offer and proof) will be wasted and could actually hurt existing traffic sources that may have some value - such as organic search traffic.

Getting more traffic to your site is fairly straightforward, you need to make people aware of your site and the valuable content on it that may be of interest to them. There are many options here:

Fast and Free Options

1. Join forums, facebook groups, directories and provide links to relevant content. Do NOT go spamming people - pay attention to group and forum rules, and always ensure that if you are going to provide a link, it's relevant and valuable.

2. Make your website content more visible to existing fans and customers - Ensure your website is linked in your email signature, on your business cards, on your print materials, listed on your LinkedIn and other profiles and that you take advantage of any valuable content you have on your site when emailing subscribers or publishing information to social channels. Also ensure you create and maintain profiles on all possible directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor and enything else that makes sense for your industry.

3. Get business listings on search engines set up properly - Google My Business and the equivelant services of other search engines are very important to have set up and connected to your website. They help to tie physical location, contact information, reviews and reputation, physical traffic and digital traffic together in the eyes of search engines to help them know when to show your business to people searching for the services you offer.

4. News releases - If you have something truly newsworthy to share, letting the media know with a pre-written news release summary can sometimes spark some major attention and traffic.

Slower, still free:

- Search Engine Optimization - Publishing content that meets the criteria for being highly valuable and search optimized can be picked up by search engines and shown to people searching on the web. This traffic is usually highly relevant and completely free, but creating the content, maintaining it and proving it's value to the search engine can be a slow process.

- Content Marketing - Taking social media and SEO to the next level, you could create multiple social profiles, many blog posts, video content, articles on LinkedIn, participate in guest blogging and get interviewed on podcasts. Getting out there, being visible, publishing and delivering valuable insights and content, will help you build authority and trust, while driving more traffic to your site.

Paid Options

There are plenty of people and platforms out there willing to take to your money in exchange for traffic. Google, Facebook, affiliate publishers, influencers, paid reviews, sites with existing traffic - pay per click (PPC) and cost per action (CPA) traffic opportunities are everywhere.

The trick to determining what makes sense for your business really comes down to a simple profitability formula and a little market research:

1. Who's your ideal customer? Dig deep into creating proper buyer avatars. I'll address market research and building out a proper persona in future articles - or you can check out the 'offer optimizer' tool in teamcampaigns.com, or reach out here for help.

2. Where can they be found online? Are they searching on Google? On Facebook? Engaged on Instagram? Talking business on LinkedIn? Learning or being entertained on YouTube? 

3. What system do you have in place to move a prospect from stranger to customer, to advocate? 

- Where are you sending the visitor? What are they being offered to start with? 

- If you are starting with some kind of 'lead magnet' (content in exchange for their contact information), what percent opt-in? It's fairly unrealistic to expect 'cold' traffic (people who've never heard of you) to buy on their first interaction - but in some cases it is possible.

- What percent of people who opt-in become a customer?

4. Work out your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators):

I always try to ensure paid traffic campaigns are break even or better - you can take profit on the up-sell or re-bill for subscriptions, but try to avoid being out of pocket for traffic costs at the first transaction.

For lead generation based sales:

- Say your average entry point offer value is $97 (you're selling something for $97 to each new customer - $97 is your Average Order Value -- now it could vary if you have more upsells/downsells that are in the funnel, you'll have to do the math).

- You want $10,000 in sales in a month from your paid traffic efforts...

- Then, say you have an opt-in rate of around 20% on your landing page (2 out of 10 people who visit it will opt-in for your lead magnet) - use your real rate if you have one

- And say you have 1% of people who opt-in that will buy that $97 offer... (use your real rate if you have one)

- If you wanted $10,000 in $97 sales, you'd need 10,000/97 = 103 customers

- To get 103 customers at a 1% lead conversion rate, you'd need 103/0.01 = 10,300 leads

- Let's assume you target a solid Click Through Rate of 3% in order to achieve a good relevance/quality score on your ad network (and please, if you or the people doing this for you don't know what this is - stop now and contact me for help)

- To get 10,300 leads at a 20% opt-in rate, you'd need 10,300/.2 =51,500 clicks

- You should target a Cost Per Acquisition of half of your order value ($97/2 = $48.50 CPA)

- To make $10,000 revenue from 51,500 clicks at 2x your CPA, you'd need to spend no more than $5,000 to acquire 103 customers.

- Your Cost Per Click (CPC) should be $5000/51,500 = $0.09/click  - I usually look for markets where we can afford at least $1/click and the competition isn't too high - but that doesn't mean you have to.

- Your Cost Per Lead (CPL) should be $48.50*0.01 = $0.48/lead - in some markets, this is possible - and it's possible to have much higher opt-in rates and conversions - but you really need to evaluate how realistic this is and where you can buy qualified traffic at that rate. 

- There will be a significant amount of time and money spent on testing and getting everything dialed in to reach even this conversion rate, then optimize beyond it. Even if you create the ads yourself, and the funnel, expect to spend at least $5000 testing everything to get everything dialed in (if it's possible and you know what you're doing) plus the $5000 in ad spend to make these sales once it is.

Your KPIs are now:

Ad Optimization KPIs:

- Cost Per Click (CPC): $0.09 or less

- Click Through Rate (CTR): 3%

- Cost Per Lead (CPL): $0.48

Funnel Optimization KPIs:

- Landing Page Conversion Rate: 20%

- Sales Conversion Rate: 1%

Profitability KPIs:

- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): $48.50

- Average Order Value (AOV) of $97

Let's run this again for a direct ecommerce sales strategy (rather than lead generation):

- Let's say you are selling a $500 product (AOV) with a $50 Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)

- You'd want AOV/2)-COGS.. So Cost Per Acquisition should be ($500/2)-$50=$200 CPA 

- With a 1% sales conversion rate, you'd want your Cost Per Click (CPC) to be $2 at most

- With a goal of $20,000 in sales, you'd need 40 customers at $500 AOV, so you'd need to spend $8,000 at $200 CPA, driving 4000 clicks at $2 each, if you hit your KPIs - which would yield $12,000 Gross Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) or $10,000 profit on $10,000 cost including COGS and CPA - but the first month you may well spend $5,000-$10,000 just getting the funnel set up and tested so you may break even or make a little profit (or you may spend more and not make a profit)

5. You should also note that even the slightest increase in conversion rate at any level will drastically increase profit, and that upsells, email follow-up and retargeting will maximize your back end profit

User Experience

Let's face it, if people visiting your site can't find what they're looking for - they leave. There's very little chance anyone wants what you offer, from you, so bad that they'll fight to stay on and use your broken, slow or confusing website.

When it comes to User Experience Optimization (UXO) there's a few main categories to look at:

1. Speed

2. Compatibility 

3. Navigation

4. Information

5. Actionability

Let's start with speed...

The first thing to do is scan your site to look for any obvious issues with speed optimization. GTMetrix.com is a free tool that will make it very clear (at least to your web developer) exactly what should be done to speed things up from an on-page, technical point of view.

On-top of the list of items GTMetrix says to fix, you may find you need to utilize faster/more powerful hosting, and optimize back end systems and code.

I'm not going to dive deep into fixing each item in the GTMetrix list, there's plenty of resources you can Google for that (or reach out [here] if you want some help).

Compatibility...

Assuming your site loads fast, does it load properly? I mentioned earlier that you should check your analytics data to determine the type of devices people are visiting your site with - but you can pretty much assume that you MUST make your website work on the major browser:

- Desktop: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari - on all major resolutions

- Mobile: Chrome, Safari  - on iphone 5 size to ipad pro (Google for latest screen resolution market shares)

There's plenty of tools for testing this, such as crossbrowsertesting.com and I HIGHLY suggest that YOU actually test your site on all of the computers and devices you can get your hands on.

If you find there is an issue with rendering any part of your site or funnels on any major device or resolution, you'll want a web developer to resolve it immediately.

Navigation...

This is where things get a little subjective, and using proper User Experience Testing and Research techniques can help. Making sure that people visiting your site are able to access the information they want, immediately, is critical - but not everyone thinks like you (and many won't know your lingo).

It's often best to ensure navigation flows by persona, symptom, problem and goal, solution category as well as enabling search, FAQs and a knowledge base.

Before building your site, you may want to take advantage of a Card Sort. This is a very simple technique where you write down every page/subject on a separate card (or use some online software for this) and organize the cards into logical piles by navigation heading/category. If you hand your sorted piles to someone else, and ask them to find a few random subjects/pages, are they able to guess the right piles to start from? If not, ask them to re-sort the piles and explain their reasoning. Do this a few times, with a few people, and see how you can create a navigation structure that accommodates most, if not all, of your subject's mind sets (remember, it's OK to have more than 1 route to a page).

If your site is already up and running, you may want to have a few people run the same kind of test - have them sit in front of your site (try both on a computer and mobile device) and find pages by topic or goal. If the struggle, you'll want to try to understand their thought process and see how you can adjust the navigation to accommodate.

Another option, if your site is already running, is to install a system like Hotjar to record sessions of visitors on your site. You'll be able to see what they see, and how they interact with your pages and menus.

On top of being able to find the right link, it's also very important that the page the link goes to identifies itself. If someone clicks on a link expecting a page about a certain topic, the headline and graphics need to clearly indicate that they are in the right place.

Information...

Just like navigation, information can be a little tricky... you need to make sure that you really understand your market. If your site isn't clear about who you are, what you do, who's it for, why they should care and how your product or service benefits the visitor and functions to do so, the visitor will leave.

You'll want to ensure you have at least some basic pages or sections to your site:

- About - This should include the people behind the company, the company's mission, vision and some background information and story to help your visitor get to know you and your brand a bit more.

- Services/Products - If you don't list what you sell/do, people will get frustrated.

- FAQ - Address the common questions and concerns of your market.

- Contact - How can people get in touch?

On top of those 4 basic elements, having content that speaks directly to your customer's individual situations and desires is key to driving engagement. Creating valuable blogs and articles around specific topics of interest to your market, ensuring you tie back that content to some sort of offer, will help your visitors experience some up-front value, get a sense that you understand and know them, and understand what you have to offer. Don't hide that you have something to sell - just make sure you give the user a chance to experience some value, get to know you, and understand what it is your selling, why it matters to them and how it works.

If you're unsure what topics your visitors want to know about, the easiest thing to do is spend a few hours doing some market research:

- Look at your competitor's FAQs, messaging, ads, blog topics

- Look at your reviews and testimonials, and those of your competitors and related companies in your market for common themes and concerns

- Look at social media comments on your pages and those of your competitors and related companies to see what problems and questions come up

- Google for top blogs in your niche/market and see what topics and comments come up on the most popular ones

- Use keyword tools like Keywords Everywhere to see search volume for related topics

- Talk to your customers, run surveys, ask your sales staff

You can't skip market research - if you don't know what motivates and holds back your customers, you can't address them with the right messaging to make sales.

Actionability...

Convenience is coveted by today's consumers. If you don't make it extraordinarily easy to buy from you, many just won't. Whenever possible, direct ecommerce, live chat, and/or online appointment scheduling should be available to make the process fast and simple.

This also means that whenever you create content that relates to a product or service, you need to present an immediately actionable offer. When a prospect get's excited and interested in buying, it better be easy and obvious what to do next.

Using systems like Hotjar will help you watch as visitors interact with your website and sales systems to ensure they don't stumble, and utilizing retargeting and triggered email sequences to bring people back is critical to leveraging the most value from your traffic.

Offer

One of the most common, and overlooked problems, is that business owners just assume that people want what they are selling. 

Take the time to evaluate how your offer fits within your market, the level of demand for what you're selling, and how your competition is selling.

You need to be able to clearly, and concisely, answer these questions:

- Who sells what you sell and how are they selling it?

- Who buys what you sell and why do they buy it?

- Why should they buy it from you?

Take the time to read your competitor's reviews and testimonials, social post, comments, ads and headlines. List out:

- 3 most common themes in your competitor's headlines

- How your competitors position themselves

- What their USPs are

- What their value propositions are

- What people say in testimonials

- Top ads by your competitors (run the longest, most frequent)

- Sites your competitors advertise on

You can get a sense of your market demographics using tools like Facebook Audience Insights, Alexa, Adbeat and many others - but its the research into the common problems and motivations that will help you craft your messaging in a way that your customers identify with. 

If your offer is affordable and valuable, addresses real problems, is authentic and people actually buy it,  then you're probably OK from these standpoints.

Just make sure your sales materials have the basic elements of a good sales presentation: a promise to solve something that matters, risk reversal/a guarantee, emotional connectivity between the benefits of your solution and the ultimate transformation and desires of your prospect, a clear irresistible high-value offer, solid answers to objections, a direct call to action, and proof...

Trust and Reputation

Finally, if you have traffic, your site is optimized and navigable and you have a good offer, it may be a matter of trust that's holding back your sales.

The first thing you should do is evaluate how trustworthy you and your brand look on the web:

- Do you have a good quantity of recent, high quality, positive reviews on multiple platforms? A few non-perfect reviews are fine and actually lend a bit to a sense that your reviews are real. Never use fake testimonials or reviews and don't let your reviews go stale - you need to keep asking customers to leave you feedback across multiple channels.

- Are you active on multiple platforms, publishing engaging and quality content? Posting on major social networks and responding to comments is important to show you are an active business.

- Do you respond to reviews and comments? It shows you care and pay attention.

- Do you update your profiles and websites regularly with  new, valuable, content? Outdated/incorrect information or lack of activity makes it look like you abandoned your business.

The next things is to ensure you are placing proof where it matters most, within your offer and funnel and ads:

- Can people see who you are? Post your information, story, background, and photos/videos to help people get to "know, like and trust" you.

- Can people watch or see testimonials from real customers? Ask your customers to provide reviews and testimonials if they are satisfied.

- Do you demonstrate how your product delivers the results you promise? Create a video that illustrates this.

- Are you credentialed or an authority in your market? Is this visible? Post your credentials, get recommendations, create authoritative content, or rely on testimonials and other proof.

When you combine the right messaging, a good offer, real proof, an active and trustworthy brand, a solid sales funnel and qualified affordable traffic, you get ROI positive sales.

If any of this is unclear, or you would like someone to help you track down and come up with how to solve what's wrong with your digital presence, feel free to reach out via my LinkedIn or here.