Clicks are vanity. Enquiries are sanity.

Some businesses pay too much attention to overall levels of website traffic.  I’m here to argue against that.

I often say to clients: clicks are vanity – enquiries are sanity.

I’ve seen websites with tons of traffic but poor conversion rates, and websites with lower traffic – but better enquiry rates.

In this article I cover this topic in more depth and include recommendations to help businesses that have become too focused on numbers of clicks to their website.

What’s a good outcome from website visitors?

If you asked most businesses what they think a good outcome would be from their website visitors, they’d likely say:

More enquiries or more sales.

So why is it that so many businesses seem obsessed with the levels of clicks they get to their website?

The problem is often the senior management – typically who can’t bear to see numbers/graphs that show declines in clicks to their website.

A supporting problem are their staff/external suppliers, who know that their bosses are obsessive about click numbers.  Those supporting staff (e.g. those in marketing) would often like to tell their bosses the errors in their clicks-obsessed viewpoint … but, due to the necessity to stay employed, aren’t often in a position to rock the boat.

Side note: when I was an employee at various companies, I spent much of my time rocking the boat and few of my bosses liked my questioning and so I moved on to those who seemed to be more progressive.  Nowadays I get to do it with clients who expect me to give them the big picture and lead them towards more enquiries from their websites and marketing.

Who is doing better than the other?

Compare these numbers for two competitor businesses …

 

Company 1

1,000 clicks to their website during a month.

60 enquiries.

 

Company 2

500 clicks to their website during a month.

50 enquiries

 

Company 1 got 10 more enquiries than Company 2 BUT those 60 enquiries represented only 6% of their total clicks vs Company 2 whose 50 enquiries were 10% of their total clicks.

Company 1 wins on volume but Company 2 wins on conversion rate.

For some businesses, they’d be happy to be Company 1 – plenty of website clicks and 6% becoming enquiries.

But what if Company 2 finds a way to increase their traffic to the same as Company 1 and keeps their same 10% conversion rate?  Here’s how that would look:

 

Company 1

1,000 clicks to their website during a month.

60 enquiries (6%)

 

Company 2

1,000 clicks to their website during a month.

100 enquiries (10%)

 

Now it’s not such a good place to be company 1.

Quality of clicks (or lack of)

I’ve had conversations with many businesses who are rigid in their clicks-increasing being their measure of success.

Those that I get to work with are taken on a journey that looks in more detail about their clicks and uncovers clicks that are:

  1. From countries that will never be customers
  2. Junk clicks (e.g. bots)
  3. Visitors to blog posts that some idiot marketer told them would be good posts to have, but just bring in a load of information gatherers who will never be customers
  4. Not going any further than the pages they landed on
  5. Poor quality clicks from paid advertising that needed more attention.

Enquiries-focused clicks

While you can’t always attribute enquiries back to specific clicks/website visitors, you can still achieve that a lot of the time.

Here’s my recommended approach to what most businesses should be doing instead of focusing on clicks – all as part of a process every month that looks back at the previous month …

  1. Identify total clicks to the website.
  2. Segment by those from countries that you can and do serve.
  3. Further segment by those from your target country/countries that visited specific product or service pages.
  4. Compare the numbers of relevant visitors to enquiries about those specific products or services.
  5. See what’s getting a good conversion rate and what isn’t.
  6. Feel good that, regardless of the success rate, you’re focusing on conversions from the right types of clicks.
  7. THEN go deeper into the visitors to pages that didn’t convert well enough … and that’s a completely different story too big to go into here (but ask me if you want to know how!).

 

 

A hypothetical example of mapping this out.

A widgets manufacturer sells only to UK customers.

They have 500 visitors in the month.

Only 200 of those are from the UK.  They’re the ones that matter.

100 of those 200 got to their (only products) red or blue widgets pages – 50/50.  This tells us that something ‘lost’ the other 100, or they were poor quality clicks.

10 red widgets visitors became enquiries (20%)

5 blue widgets visitors became enquiries (10%)

They need to look at the differences between the visitors to/marketing utilised for the blue widgets page as it gets half the enquiries of red widgets .. but even then still need to look at why red widgets only convert 20% of relevant UK clicks to their pages.

How to take a brave pill

If you undertake work (employee or external) for someone who is too focused on clicks, then you have a choice:

Keep massaging the ego of those who focus primarily on clicks (and go through an ongoing process of stresses about why enquiries aren’t higher) or …

… take a brave pill.

Here’s how …

  1. Send a simple message to the person who should care about getting more enquiries (usually the boss) asking for one clarification: What countries do you sell to? I have some thoughts about how to get more enquiries.
  2. When they confirm the target geography, pull out all the analytics data related to visitors from that geography, including numbers sub-divided into those who got to certain product or service pages.
  3. Message the person again, showing numbers of relevant visitors (potential buyers) to those pages, saying “I think I can help if you can give me a feel for the numbers of enquiries related to each of those [products/services]?”
  4. By this point they should be more engaged with your proactive way of thinking and start to evolve away from the blinkered picture of looking at overall website clicks.

You may not win them over every time but you’ll know you’ve done the right thing and when people are deaf to good advice then you at least know your talents could be better-utilised elsewhere.