More Traffic Won’t Fix Your Conversions

Traffic Retention Kicks New Traffic’s BUTT!

Them’s fightin werds!  It’s alright though, I’m bringing the can of traffic whoop ass to the table today… I’m down for the fight.  I think that traffic growth has been getting too much attention over retaining existing traffic, and I also think that when done right, existing traffic should rightfully outperform new traffic every day of the week.  Yea that’s right, you heard me; EVERY day of the week (*flexes muscles*).

When You Got Lemons…

Plenty of site owners will come to you insisting that getting more traffic is high priority over many other things that are of actual greater importance.  For example getting rid of the scrolling blinky text on the home page.  Or that 10 minute flash intro page you can’t skip to get to the home page.  But what about the people already visiting the site?  Aren’t they important?  Don’t they need some love too?

What good is getting more traffic when the existing traffic isn’t doing what you want them to do?  If you get more in there, then the issue of lost revenue and conversions just grew even larger and now you look like a big ol’ dink for not getting them from point A to point B.  Smooth move Captain Genius…

Take that existing traffic and get them to the right place; make lemonade out of these lemons!  First things first, time to look at top entrance pages with an eagle eye to figure out what exactly is turning visitors off about this page.  More specifically, perform the following test against each page;

• Per page, note the keywords that brought them to you
• Using Google Analytics Site Overlay or something similar, map out what links are getting clicked the most on these pages
• Compare the landing page keywords against where they’re clicking and see if they are related
• If they are related, make sure they’re getting somewhere relevant after clicking that link
• If not related and clicks are low, time to rethink the layout of the page
• If they land and then exit the site, time to rethink the layout of the page

That last point is usually your best bet for retaining traffic on a page-per-page basis.  Whatever brought them there is not popping up in front of them so they’re getting frustrated and either leaving your site entirely or trying to navigate deeper into your site hoping to find it.

If you haven’t looked into a/b Testing, I suggest you go learn about it now.  This is your true metric of success after changing a page layout with hopes of traffic retention.  Getting signed up with Crazy Egg just for this very purpose isn’t a bad idea.

Understanding Your Traffic Jams

More often than not, you’ll find that a site with traffic has a tell-tale problem of low conversions compared to relatively good traffic.  In most cases, e-commerce sites are expected to convert 1 in 10 visitors (respectively 10%) in order to be on track.  When it comes to service based sites, there isn’t really any kind of percentage to go off of.

Google Analytics has implemented a pretty nifty feature called Benchmarking which aims to provide webmasters with the ability to gauge where they should be traffic wise compared to other sites in similar industries.

While the accuracy of these numbers are debatable, it’s still better than nothing to go off of.  Based off of what this will provide in terms of industry standards, you can start mapping out an acceptable conversion percentage.  Start low, like 2% or 4% of your traffic and see if you meet the goal.  If not, don’t feel the need to lower your expectations.  Just hang tight and keep working on your poor performing pages until you see a nice funnel happening from landing page to conversion point.

Conclusion

The biggest boon to retooling your existing pages, and this should be pretty obvious, is that if you can reverse your existing page bounce and site exit rates down to an acceptable rate (i.e. below 35% of all traffic for a day), when you start increasing traffic, you won’t have as much work ahead of you for trying to convert an even larger stream of visitors.