Are Website Leads Directly Correlated to High Traffic Volume? No.

Trying to draw a direct correlation from web traffic fluctuation directly into lead volume is tough. The math does not always add up. Because we feel we don’t understand why the math does not work uncertainty sets in and changes are made with the web marketing strategies. More often than not the impact of these changes is not great and conclusions about the quality of the web traffic deteriorating are drawn.  The issue comes from the fact that most of us do not actually understand our web traffic well enough to figure out the formula to correlate web traffic to web activity.

Here is the problem: Only a portion of your traffic is from actual prospects. When pushing your pay per click or other online marketing traffic you have to be able to observe a lift in the activity generated. If you don’t you are probably not attracting the right visitors to your site. In the same line of idea you will likely see a more important decrease in generated activity than the drop in traffic observed when your traffic goes down. It’s simple math but only tracking and time will help you acquire that knowledge. Here is a brief example;

Let’s say a site has 2,500 visitors each month but a 10% drop in web traffic happens (down 250). This reduction in traffic could translate in a reduction of 20% in web prospect activity! The panic could be setting in; you have sit down and review the numbers. Here is why it is probably normal. Your web traffic has a baseline. That baseline is made of vendors, staff, past clients, families, job seekers etc.

Your web traffic baseline can account for as much as 40% of the traffic in a smaller site (sometimes more!). If we assume 40%, it means that 60% of the web traffic observed is actually “real” traffic. When the total traffic goes down 10% it comes out of the 60% not the 40% baseline. That traffic has very little to do with market conditions. If you were getting 4% of these 60% of web shoppers (1,500) to take action, you were getting about 60 prospects per month. If the 10% reduction is backed out of 1,500 you are left with 1,250 “real” visits and 4% lead is now 50 or 10 less (20% reduction).

Many will go and make dramatic changes to their marketing strategies and could in fact break something that was not broken in the first place. While it is hard to gauge these numbers exactly, it is critical to be aware of this reality as it can cause unnecessary stress. By constantly measuring and tracking activity, page views, visit length and traffic sources you will be able to keep a better perspective on your web activity and not pull the panic button when it is not warranted.

We recently reviewed a client’s site where the traffic did not go down much but the volume of live chats did go down dramatically (4 times more). This phenomenon happened the first week of May. We quickly were able to identify two main causes to this change. 1) This client was a new homebuilder and the tax credit has expired so the public’s interest in buying a new home had dropped. 2) The volume of return traffic increased because they did more strategic marketing to past web shoppers.

Based on these observations it came down to two possible strategies. Increase traffic or get more out of the existing web traffic. That builder increased its buy on Google Adwords and traffic did pick up some along with a slight improvement in lead volume. We also also revisited the website engagement strategy, the call to action that a web shopper saw was maybe not strong enough. By changing how the live chat proactive invitation’s text we were able to regain some of the engagement rate. By changing the live chat invitation’s timing, frequency we also were able to engage more of the traffic that was there. The panic button was never pulled and as the traffic quality improved more, so did the chat engagement rate. It was a simple matter of understanding the quality of the traffic and trying new strategies to engage more of them to use the live chat feature!

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