Quality v quantity: Getting more of the right visitors to your website

When it comes to website traffic, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.

Yes, it’s nice to have hundreds, if not thousands (or millions) visiting your website, but lots of eyeballs are useless if that doesn’t convert to sales.

We’ve explained the usefulness of analytics in giving you a picture of what’s going on on your website and, once you start looking at your website statistics, you’ll be able to see how many people are visiting your website.

Once you have this data it’s vital to compare it with your enquiries and your sales as well as taking note of how many people are filling in your contact form.

“Ask yourself, out of every 100 people who visit your site, how many enquiries is that resulting in?” says Ryan Jenkins, Easy Weddings Sales Manager who has worked in online sales and marketing for more than 10 years, for the likes of Virgin Money and ING.

“A good rule of thumb is about 10%. Of those 100 people, 10% should contact you and of that 10%, getting three sales is a very reasonable conversion rate.”

“That’s what’s important, monetising your website traffic. It’s great that you can get 10,000 visitors through your site per month, but they’re worth nothing without the contact or sales.”

Ryan says that converting traffic to enquiries and then sales (or directly to sales), is the whole reason a business has a website but that having a great website is not the only thing that matters.

“A success online sale is the combination of great customer service, offering potential customers lots of relevant and easy-to-digest information as well, of course, as offering value in the form of a product or service that people want or need.

“That’s the thing many business don’t realise,” Ryan stresses, “We or any other advertiser can send all the traffic in the world to your website, but once they get there, it’s up to you to ensure the site is compelling enough to convert enquiries.

In coming newsletters, we’ll address what content to include on your website but, in the meantime, if you want to know what to include, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If you were looking at purchasing your product or service, what would you want to know?

Also, be sure to check out competing websites and see how they display or market their offerings and see if you can tweak your own content accordingly.

“We’re sending your exact demographic directly to your website and, if they click on your ad, they’re probably very interested in whatever it is you’re selling,” adds Ryan, “but when they hit your web page, it has to entice them. We can’t control them, but you can with great content, a professional looking website and, of course, a great product.