Website traffic but no leads

The website traffic report shows growth. Organic traffic is up by a third in six months, the ads bring clicks, time spent on page is getting longer. The director opens the report, nods and then asks the sales team how many new inquiries came in this month. The answer is a surprise. It is about the same as last year.

This conversation happens more often than you would expect. Traffic and inquiries are two different measurements. Between them runs a path, and somewhere along it the visitor stops and never converts. Until you find the point where the visitor stops, you will not get more inquiries.

Below are five places where the path to an inquiry most often breaks and what you can improve at each one.

The traffic is wrong, not too small

The first possibility is the least pleasant one and the most common. People come to your site who will never be your clients.

A company that makes industrial lifts once found that its most visited page was an article about how load capacity is measured. The article was good. It was read by students at technical schools. The orders, though, come from maintenance managers in production plants, and they search for completely different things.

When the gap looks like this, more traffic does not help. Different content does. Check which pages bring traffic and which pages bring inquiries. These are almost always two different lists. Once you look more closely at where your clients actually come from, you will quickly see which channel looks good in a report and which one affects revenue.

Your site does not say what you do

A visitor spends a few seconds on a page before deciding whether to stay. In that time they have to understand three things:

• what you offer,
• who it helps, and
• what they should do now.

Many companies have a sentence on the home page that sounds pleasant and says nothing. "Your reliable partner on the road to a digital future" does not tell anyone whether you make hardware or advise on tax. A visitor who arrived from a search engine and has no patience keeps looking.

The fix is simple and uncomfortable at the same time. Write your home page and your main landing pages so that someone who knows nothing about your company understands them. If you are rebuilding the whole presentation, it makes sense to start with website development that is built around your sales goals and not around your internal organisation.

The form is an obstacle, not a path to conversion

This is where most inquiries are lost. The good news is that you can fix it quickly.

A form with twelve fields, where the VAT number, the postal address and a drop-down list the visitor does not understand are all mandatory, is a filter. It filters the wrong way. It puts off everyone who is in a hurry and lets through only those who have time to fill it in. The buying decision is usually made by the first group, because they have a problem right now and want it solved today.

Look at your form through the eyes of a person who wants to ask you one question. How many fields does the form need before you can prepare an answer? In most cases three: name, contact and question. You can ask for everything else in the next conversation.

The same goes for what happens after the click. If the visitor gets an empty page or the message "Thank you for your message", they do not know whether you received it, when they will get an answer and who will contact them. Tell them all three.

This is what our custom web form builder is for. It is part of our platform and it lets you change a form in a few clicks, without a developer and without waiting for the next version of your website.

The inquiry arrives and nobody picks it up

Now we come to the part that marketing reports do not see.

The inquiry lands in a shared mailbox. Two colleagues watch that mailbox. One assumes the other has taken it. The message moves down the list, because five new emails have arrived in the meantime. A week later the client calls your competitor.

This is the most common way a company loses business it has already paid for through its website, its advertising and its search engine optimisation. If inquiries collect in email and in a spreadsheet, that is not a system. You need a CRM system.

The answer is that every inquiry from your website lands automatically in a system where it gets an owner, a deadline and a status. CRM Sales, part of Kabi CRM, our own CRM platform, takes the inquiry straight from the form on your site, assigns the person responsible and puts it into the sales process. Nobody retypes data and no message stays unanswered, because responsibility is already set.

You do not know which inquiry became a sale

A company knows how many inquiries came in. It does not know how many of them became sales, or where they came from.

Without that link you guess every year where to put your budget. With the link and a system in place, within a few months you can see that your ads bring many inquiries with a low value, while three articles in your news section bring fewer inquiries with a much higher average deal value. That is the kind of figure that changes a marketing budget.

To measure this at all, the source of the inquiry has to be recorded on the individual opportunity, not only in your analytics. Tracking inquiries matters. When you set up measurement on the site, web analytics helps, as long as it is configured to measure the events that matter to you and not only the number of visits.

Where to start this week

If you feel that we are describing your company, start with these three questions.

• First, how many inquiries did you receive last month, and how many visitors did the site have.
• Second, how long on average did it take from the moment a form was submitted to the first reply.
• Third, how many of those inquiries did you turn into sales.

If you cannot get any of these three figures within five minutes, you have found your first problem, and it is not website traffic.

If you would like us to look at the path from visitor to inquiry on your website, get in touch with us.