Imagine your website is a physical, brick-and-mortar place of business and you witness 60-70% of the traffic that walks in the door walk right back out in under a minute.
How effective would you consider your marketing investment that drove the traffic to the door?
For how long would you deem such a high rate of first-impression failure, of abandonment, to persist?
My guess is not for very long.
You would be anxious to figure out why prospects are so quickly walking away.
You would change whatever was necessary to keep shoppers from leaving.
Driving traffic to your website is important.
But, too many well-intentioned digital marketing agencies and website developers have convinced business leaders that their website’s underwhelming performance is due to not having enough traffic.
Their pitch is to have you throw money away on SEO.
The argument, like on this blog post (https://sumo.com/stories/website-metrics) is that without traffic there is nothing else to measure.
Our rebuttal is that without converting traffic, there will be NOTHING to measure. You’ll be out of business.
Why waste time and money driving more traffic to the door knowing the majority are going to quickly leave without buying and perhaps never come back?
First, fix the issues that are contributing to the loss of traffic.
Then, invest in attracting more traffic that you know has a much better chance of converting.
What then is the most important metric to measure your website’s performance?
Rate of goal/event conversion. What is the most important and relevant action for your guest to take on any one page of your website? What percentage of every 100 visitors is performing that action?
Work to get THAT number above 60% instead of the bounce rate and you’ll be thrilled with your website.
How do you do that? I’ll address that question in an upcoming post.
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