Does Your Site Get Enough Traffic?

Does your website have enough traffic to be effective as a lead generator for your business?

Your website is like any other marketing and sales activity that you conduct - only a percentage of the people that you contact will actually become a customer.

It all becomes a numbers game. Let's look at direct mail as an example. Direct mail gets around a 0.1% to 2% response rate. At a 1% response rate, in order to get 10 leads or sales or whatever you are targeting, you will need to send out 1000 letters to achieve your objective. The cost of acquisition at $2 per letter will be $200 per sale or lead.

It is the same with your website, you need traffic to your site to make it effective as a marketing tool, because only a small percentage of those anomyous visitors will become leads.

Your analytics results can provide you with some valuable insights into the behavior or your visitors. So let's look at the different categories of visitors to your sites.

Bots or Spiders- there are probably millions of different automated bots crawling the Internet. Google, Bing and other search engines crawl your site on a regular basis. There are others that are looking for something particular like sites with security flaws to exploit. These bots or spiders will never become your customers. Google Analytics does not report automated visitors but if you are using server logs as the basis for your reporting, it is probably counting these as visitors.

8 Seconds - you have 8 seconds to convince a visitor to stay on your site and read your content before they leave. A proportion of your visitors - no matter how good your site - will leave within 8 seconds. They were just looking for something else.

One page only - around 50% or visitors will leave only having visited one page of your site. This includes the 8 second visitors. This statistic is called the bounce rate.

Anonymous Visitors - these are visitors to your site that may read more then one page of your site, or return to read some more pages but are still basically unknown to you. At this stage you don't know what stage of the buying cycle they are at. They could be researching rather than ready to buy or contact you.

The number of visitors that convert to leads or customers is generally pretty low and the conversion rate is dependent upon a number of factors including:

• Calls to Action - Does your site have a call to action? In many cases, the objective of your site should be to collect their email address, so you can follow them up with more information.
• Design - Is your design consistent with the message that you are trying to portray.
• Trust & Reputation - Does your site build trust and show that you have the expertise to solve your clients problems or supply them with the products or service that they need.
• Industry - Sales sites of low priced items vs leads for high value services.

If you only are getting around 100 visitors per month and have a conversion rate of 1%, that is 1 lead/sale per month. However if can can build that traffic to 1,000 visitors per month then that is 10 leads or sales per month. It is also important to remember that different traffic sources with have different conversion rates.

So how can you build traffic to your site:

1. Google - from organic listings. The key is getting ranked on the first page (ideally top 3 spots on 1st page) for search terms that are relevant for your business.
2. Google Adwords - paid advertisements on Google. It will not deliver the same traffic as a top 3 spot but sometimes (often) the top spots are too hard to get.
3. Email - email campaigns to your customers and your mailing list. Email continues to be one of the highest converting traffic sources.
4. Other Search Engines - Yahoo, Bing etc. In Australia, Google dominates with about 95% of teh serach market.
5. Social Media - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
6. Links from other sites - The best links will give you traffic and a search engine boost.