Your digital marketing campaign is generating thousands of visitors but you are only getting a handful of leads. What are you missing?

5 reasons why your website is not generating enough sales leads.

If the number of visitors you are getting from your online campaigns is high but you are not getting that much sales leads, you may have a website conversion issue.

Especially, if you’re sure that your campaign is targeting the right people with the right message. This is time for a pause…

The time for you to review the conversion rate of your website and ways you can improve it.

What is conversion rate?

Put simply, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your website. In general, it takes the form of a visitor filling up a form to subscribe to a newsletter, to try a product or to make a purchase.

You normally want to maximise your conversion rate. This is what Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is about.

A low conversion rate represents missed opportunities. More importantly, it represents cash that you are throwing away in your campaigns.

How?

The money you are investing in your campaigns is bringing visitors to your website. Great! However, your website is not effectively converting these visitors into meaningful leads – Visitors are coming, but they are leaving your website without initiating any sort of contact.

Now consider this. Up to 70 to 80 percent of these visitors will never come back to your site. You can still recover some via a re-marketing campaigns, but if your website is still not optimised for conversion, that’s just more money that you are wasting.

Conversely, the higher your conversion rate, the lesser you need to spend on advertising.

Indeed, as your conversion rate increases, you start getting more leads from the same number of visitors. This, can be directly felt on your sales. The table below from Hubspot is a good illustration.

Optimising your website for conversion is therefore a no brainer. Especially, if you want to grow your sales.

How many leads should my website be generating?

To know if your website is generating enough leads, having a broad idea of average conversion rates in mind is useful.

The chart below from WordStream (2018), gives an insight of conversion rates in different industries. It is based on a study of thousands of Google Ad accounts (formerly known as AdWords) having a combined spending of $3 billion in annual spending.

While these figures are not set in stone, given the many variables that come into account, its a good starting point.

If your website is at anything below 1 or 1.5 percent in conversion rate, you should start looking more closely at your conversion tactics.

While, anything below 1 or 1.5 percent may not be an issue, if that’s the nature of your industry, it should still direct you to review the conversion mechanisms on your website to make sure that you are not missing anything. Specially, if you have not done the exercise before.

Normally, you’ll try to aim at something around 2 to 3 percent. Higher results are possible, depending on your industry. This would, however, require additional efforts and constant monitoring of your conversion optimisation actions.

However, the application of simple best practices and common sense can already bring you positive results. Below is short list of things you’ll want to consider:

1. Don’t send people who click on your ads to your home page.

Your online ad had a very specific message. Interesting enough for people to click on it. Sending them to the home page creates confusion as they are presented with general information not directly to the message in the ad.

Remember this. You have less than 15 seconds to convince a visitor to stay on your website. So you better make your point immediately from the moment the visitor hits your website.

2. Use landing pages

Which brings us to the importance of a landing page. Unbounce defines it as a standalone web page, created specifically for the purposes of a marketing campaign and designed with a single focused objective – entice the visitor to take an action. For example: Fill a form.

Below are some key features you’ll want for you landing page:

• Engaging titles.
• A layout that highlights your key selling points.
• Call to Actions are easily accessible.
• Short forms
• Absence of navigation menus that will drive visitors away from that landing page.

Below are a couple of examples of good landing pages.

3. Use the principles behind good landing pages on key sections of your website.

Even when you are not running a campaign, consider key pages of your website as landing pages. Indeed, people may land on certain areas of your website during their online search.

These are opportunities to convert more leads. So optimise these pages for conversion, using the same type of approach you would use when creating a landing page.

4. Think mobile. Always.

With people increasingly using their smartphone to browse the web, make sure your website or landing pages are mobile friendly.

5. Website speed

Finally, make sure that your website loads fast. Actually, Google now considers website speed to be a key parameter to rank your website in search results.

There are many other factors you could consider to improve the number of leads you generate on your website. However, the list above should give you an insight on the key fundamentals that you should not be missing.

If you are serious about generating more leads on your website and want to go a step further, you may want to try our website grader report. It’s a free service where we review your website and provide free recommendations.