In this blog post, we’ll show you how to troubleshoot your website’s ability to sell, using user data in your analytics software to find which part of your website needs to be optimized to improve your sales, leads, and conversion rate.
Your website may not get any sales or conversions because it doesn’t match what your customer needs, wants, and expects. Your website may have technical issues. It may be that what you’re offering needs to be more compelling.
Do you need to improve your digital marketing?
You should give it more time, just a few more weeks, to fix some of the remaining minor technical issues that tend to remain with new websites, but you’re understandably anxious.
Request a review, and our award-winning team will send you a 15-minute video audit of your website and marketing.
You’re not expecting your website to rank top of Google overnight (although you may do well if you’ve read our book, “How To Get To The Top of Google”). Still, you were expecting at least a few sales and conversions at the beginning to make it all worthwhile– Yet, yet after a few weeks of your site going live, you still need to record more sales or conversions.
All of the energy, money, and time you’ve put into planning to start your business, developing your product or services, getting your new website live, and running some advertising was not in vain.
It’s incredibly frustrating.
How much longer should you wait? A month? Two months? Six months?
If you’re converting 0% of 500 this month, without any changes, your website will convert 0% of 500 next month and the following month after that.
You have to identify exactly where things are going wrong.
Then this is something you should pay attention to if your website isn’t making any sales or converting new leads.
Digital marketing campaigns can and will take some time to take effect and work, especially with Search Engine Optimisation, where ranking improvements must be made. Still, websites should convert immediately, no matter if your traffic is only five-hundred visitors in a month.
You have to improve your website– and you have to do it today.
Why Does My Website Have No Conversions or sales?
You could be giving away free Lamborghinis, but if nobody is seeing your website, then your warehouse full of Lamborghinis will stay full because nobody will claim them.
Nobody will claim them if your website advertises the different colors of Lamborghinis in your warehouse but doesn’t mention that they’re accessible to those who ask. They’ll assume they’re available at the regular price and leave (because who has the money for a Lambo, right?).
Ask them, “Who wants more traffic?”.
I get emails from new businesses with no sales planning to rebuild their website, change their product or service, or plan something drastic because they assume that their current website, product, or service differs from what people want.
Seven times out of ten, the problem differs from what is offered.
To troubleshoot why your website is getting no sales, we’ll need to look at those problems.
The first problem is usually the need for significant website traffic:
- Is Your Website Getting Enough Traffic?
- Is Your Product or Service Being Offered Correctly?
- Is Your Product or Service Easy To Order?
- ” Website Isn’t Making Sales” Guide Are You Getting Enough Traffic?
The third problem is how the product or service is made available to order.
Take the owners of fifty websites, getting more than 500,000 visitors monthly.
If you’re advertising free Lamborghinis, but there’s no telephone number, email address, or contact form, how is anyone supposed to claim their free car?
The second problem is how their product or service is being offered– and usually, it’s precisely what the website’s stats tell me.
It doesn’t take a genius to guess how many put up their hands.
Let’s examine how we can earn more traffic.
Conversion rates vary between markets and according to the type of visitors, you are getting to your website.
In this case, your next task is to bring more traffic to your website. If you launched your website and in the first month only brought in 60 visitors, 20 of whom were friends and family, 4 of whom were you testing your website on different devices, should you expect any sales? Probably not.
Every website needs more traffic, but what use is more if you need to convert more of the traffic you already have? If your website is getting no sales, we need to do some quick maths.
How To Earn More Traffic
There are two ways to increase traffic to your website. Earning more traffic involves finances, time, resources, and patience.
Earned traffic comes from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Referral Traffic (websites linking to you and their audiences following those links), and Social Networks.
Paid traffic comes from Pay-per-Click Ads (PPC), such as Google Ads, Microsoft (Bing) Ads, Facebook Ads, and so on (there are many more).
Paying for more traffic can increase traffic quickly but consume business finances much faster.
Paid traffic can deliver a mixture of qualified and unqualified traffic quickly. When sales are needed quickly, this can help. This traffic can supply a steady income from sales, but the Cost-per-Acquisition will be higher than earned traffic, resulting in a smaller return on investment.
- Earn more traffic
- Pay for more traffic
An SEO campaign can take several months to see a return. Still, the returns typically last long after the money spent on the campaign has been used, unlike paid-for traffic, which tends to stop immediately after the last penny has been spent.
Should I Use a Digital Marketing Agency?
Earned and paid traffic sourcing can be run by yourself by someone within your company, but as much as we may have an aunt who’s good at DIY, we wouldn’t trust them to build an extension for our house. We’d use a professional.
Because they’ve had lots of practice earning traffic for other companies, they’ll know how to get a higher return on investment.
They’ll know exactly how to research marketing and see what the competition is doing.
They’ll also know how to get traffic improvements much faster than an aunt or uncle who’ll be learning the ropes as they go, resulting in traffic increases weeks or months later than a professional would.
A specialized SEO or PPC consultant can help to do all of the required analysis and set-up required for new SEO or PPC campaigns.
What Sort of Traffic Growth Rate Should I Expect With An Agency?
As you can imagine, the answer to this question depends on several factors.
Which Channels Are The Agency Using?
If the agency uses paid traffic channels, like Google Ads, then traffic increases are commonly seen in a matter of days. With SEO, results will be slower, but the quality of each lead is typically much higher and should continually grow every month.
How Much Work Are They Doing?
Paying cheap gets cheap results so you can expect low-quality traffic, expensive Costs-per-Acquisition, and the types of content and new backlinks that Google will ignore.
Cheap digital marketing is synonymous with little or no work, and you are often better at learning yourself and going it alone than opting for the cheapest marketing companies that will do little to no work.
Are They Looking At The Big Picture
Some digital marketing companies work in only one area and will wash their hands of anything that is off their patch. Agencies that handle PPC, for example, might bring paid search traffic to your site but might only be able to help if you find this traffic is converting into customers.
If you need help in multiple areas, find a full-service digital marketing company, we know one we strongly recommend, with experts in every field.
We’ve written a blog post about agency expectations, but the important thing is that you are seeing constant growth and that this growth is fast enough that you feel encouraged by their work.
Am I Getting The Right Type of Traffic?
If you’re getting hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of visitors to your websites but converting next-to-no sales or leads, then you need to examine what type of traffic you’re getting.
You may be getting hundreds or thousands of website visitors who will never contact or buy one of your products.
It may be that what you’re recording as traffic is different.
Next, you should check the pages your visitors are landing on most frequently.
In the screenshot below from Google Analytics, you’ll notice how the language settings of the visitors look spammy. That indicates that some of this website’s traffic isn’t legitimate and should be ignored.
Are people coming in through your blog posts? To your homepage? Or to other pages?
Because these people are looking for information or advice and may still need to be committed enough to settle on a final product to purchase, blog traffic will often have lower commercial intent.
The website is also getting a small amount of organic traffic. These visitors are using the site quite well, as we can see from the 3 Pages per Session and low Bounce Rate of 12.82%. We expect to have converted at least one sale from these figures so far.
In the image below, we see a site that is getting some traffic but isn’t converting.
To check how people find your website, in Google Analytics (Google’s free-to-use analytics software), click Acquisition, All Traffic, and Channels.
Social traffic tends not to convert as well as Organic or Paid Search traffic– there are exceptions, though (think influencer marketing)– so although we’d have expected the site to be getting some leads from this social traffic, there’s no need to panic.
On closer examination, we see that this traffic is different from what it seems. Clicking on Organic traffic shows us this:
Social ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest work well for you if you sell an impulse product or something people see and immediately want.
I’ve seen clever people tear their hair out over a marketing campaign that doesn’t seem to be working, only to find that the contact form or buy button isn’t working correctly.
You may already have the correct type of content, but it needs to be in a suitable medium.
Making this content available via search engines may be the best method of finding traffic, but so may Google Ads, Bing Ads, LinkedIn Ads, YouTube Ads, and all the other critical PPC ads networks.
Your website needs to provide the kind of content people are searching for before they purchase a product or request a service.
” Website Isn’t Making Sales” Guide
Does Your Website Have Technical Issues?
Be mindful that PPC is great for finding traffic but can get expensive if managed with little care, especially if that traffic isn’t converting. You may end up out of pocket entirely.
If the quality of traffic coming to the website is low, then this needs to be improved. To do this, focusing on what more qualified visitors will help to determine what to improve on the website.
Would a podcast or video series provide the level of information or expertise the visitor wants before converting? Would videos be more effective on your website? Would downloadable pdfs or books apply to more qualified visitors?
To test whether people are likely to buy from this website the owner could try running a brief Google Ads Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign to see whether search traffic will convert.
Whichever PPC network you use, target the suitable audience types so that the most relevant buyers are seeing your ads.
Suppose the PPC campaign does result in sales or converted leads. In that case, improving the website’s visibility within Google using Search Engine Optimisation should be a critical long-term focus to improve the number of qualified visitors finding the website.
No matter how much you have tried and tested your website, you have to find out the answers to these four questions right now:
Does everything work as it should?
Sometimes these notification emails get caught by an overenthusiastic spam filter, so you must check.
We like to use Gravity Forms because it saves all form submissions inside the plugin, so you can check whether people are filling the form out even if you’re not getting the notification emails.
Go through the entire process of buying or converting on your website.
Are visitors getting notifications/emails when they submit a form?
Next, check the back end to see if it works okay. , if you are driving people to a contact form, they must get confirmation that their information has been received.
Do all of your payment gateways work on all browsers?
Once ran an offer via Facebook ads with Paypal as the payment processor, we. It didn’t seem to be doing as well as we expected, and we couldn’t figure out why. Turns out that Paypal was conflicting with the Facebook mobile browser and that people using this mobile browser could not checkout using Paypal.
The problem is that everyone who clicks on a Facebook ad from the mobile app uses this Facebook mobile browser! Doh!
This issue showed up when we tested the payment inside Facebook. Testing via other mobile browsers worked fine.
Does your website work properly on all devices?
Another recent example was a long-copy landing page with a contact form in the right-hand sidebar as the primary call to action. On desktop computers, this worked great because the contact form was on the right-hand side of the page, where the Amazon “buy now” button is. Perfect!
On mobile, conversion rates were appalling.
Why? Underneath the long copy because the sidebar was being forced to the bottom of the page.
Mobile users who wanted to fill in the form quickly would have to scroll for 10 seconds to see if there was a contact form. No one scrolls for 10 seconds on mobile, not even for a free Lamborghini.
How To Check Your Website’s User Engagement
Then the next step is to see how well this traffic is engaging with your website if you’re getting traffic to your website and it looks legitimate.
The first step is to troubleshoot the basics;
How long are visitors spending on the website, and is there anything immediately turning them off?
We’d give the site another week to pick up more traffic numbers in this situation, but early signs need to look better. Something is putting visitors off.
To check this, we need to look at the bounce rate and session duration inside Google Analytics.
In the example below, you’ll see this very new site has started picking up a small number of new visitors, but they are screaming a collective “Hell no!”:
It is time to start thinking about a new website. We build two types of websites: low-cost lead generation websites for small businesses and bespoke websites, which are custom-built to meet the unique needs of larger businesses.
Even our trusty favorite, organic search traffic, which has a teensy number of visitors so far, still has a high bounce rate.
Check out my blog post on how to reduce bounce rate, and run some user tests to find out what sort of first impression the site is giving people.
The top traffic source is Paid Search, which should be well-qualified visitors. 93.44% of them are leaving the site without visiting a second page, and the average visit length of these folks is just 7 seconds! Either the ads are misleading, or the site sucks.
If you find that your bounce rate is high, that average duration is low, and that people aren’t visiting many pages, then you have found your blockage: the first impression your website gives.
What if my engagement looks okay?
In a case like this, people are using the website, and, better yet, they aren’t horrendously repelled by what they see.
In the example below, notice how the traffic numbers look okay.
The engagement stats look okay too. The bounce rate on some of those channels looks high, but it’s certainly not in the danger zone.
Your visitors are relevant, engaged, and interested. We have to get them converting.
Visitors seem happy enough and, projecting our conservative and simplistic conversion rate of 1%, we’d expect 44 conversions (4,445 new users x 1%).
Is Your Conversion Goal Appealing Enough?
Our preferred heat mapping tool, HotJar, also has Click Maps which detect which links users are clicking on the page. This can highlight which buttons or links are or need to be fixed to drive traffic around your website or to convert.
Here are some ways to identify why people aren’t buying:
You can start by asking them a question like “How can I help you today?”.
Heat mapping software is a simple piece of code you can put on your website that records visitors’ behavior.
It can show you how much of a page people are viewing. Are users scrolling down far enough to see your call-to-action, or should it be higher up the page?
When people have been on the page for a little while, the next thing you can do is install live chat on your site and have it pop up.
” Why aren’t my visitors buying or enquiring (‘ converting’)?”.
The simplest thing to do is to run some user tests. We like usertesting.com, and they have a free taster service (good idea) called peek.usertesting.com (now discontinued– we’re big fans of the cheap user tests at UsabilityHub).
You should offer them a gift with their purchase just in case they need something to make the perceived reward higher than the perceived risk.
Every website needs more traffic, but what use is more if you need to convert more of the traffic you already have? If your website is getting no sales, we need to do some quick maths …
This question can get them talking if they are stuck or need clarification. If you notice that different website visitors are asking the same questions, this indicates an issue on your website that needs to be addressed.
Let’s say that you’re an eCommerce business. Your exit popup might include a code for a discount or free delivery just in case that prevents the visitor from buying.
In other words, your product or service needs to be more appealing so that people want to buy it.
They have yet to be offered something where the perceived pleasure outweighs the perceived pain to the extent that they are motivated to action.
Use Exit Popups
The website is also getting a small amount of organic traffic.
It’s essential to recognize that all user tests are slightly biased because.
Run User Tests
Testers are sophisticated enough to sign up and install user testing software, so there’s a slight selection bias toward those who can do these things.
Even so, user tests are a valuable tool to start with. They tend to give answers which make them seem clever when people are being tested. They’ll often start talking about the elements they like or don’t like if they need help figuring out what your site is about.
Use Heat Mapping Software
Perhaps they still need to be ready to buy– but by offering them something free of charge designed to move them closer to their goals, you can give them something to begin a relationship with you in a low-risk way.
In this case, your next task is to bring more traffic to your website. Conversion rates vary between markets and according to the type of visitors, you are getting to your website. If you launched your website and in the first month only brought in 60 visitors, 20 of whom were friends and family, 4 of whom were you testing your website on different devices, should you expect any sales?
Your exit popup might include an offer for a webinar or a free download that your visitors can request if you’re a service business.
You can use this to offer them something enticing to get them to stay or an extra incentive to move forward with you.
Recognizing which element of your website prevents people from converting is the first step to fixing it.
You can test using an exit popup when someone moves to leave your website. This is a type of popup that appears.
How To Use Social Proof To Improve Conversion Rates
Testimonials and case studies are a great way to do this as a review on your website and on third-party sites like Facebook, TripAdvisor, TrustPilot, and so on.
The challenge for new businesses is getting those all-important first reviews. You don’t need many: one review is better than none, and you should have a way of getting someone to review your product or service.
One of the things that eCommerce businesses can do to boost the social proof of their websites is to include product videos where a knowledgeable person in the company shows visitors around each product. This should be done sensitively to avoid appearing overly ‘pitchy.’ Still, as long as the reviewer is passionate and knowledgeable, the effects of these videos can be significant.
Before people buy, they like to know that others in their situation have made the same choice and been happy with it.
When Nothing Is Working, simple Conversion Improvements For:
- Do you see successful competitors in your market?
- How is their offering different from yours?
- Do they have more credibility than you?
- Is their product or service more appealing than yours?
It might be time to look at your business model or offer if you’ve tried everything and yet people need to convert from your website.
Are customers buying/signing up/contacting? If so, why? If not, is it clear that they are supposed to take the action you want them to take?
Does the perceived benefit of this action outweigh the cost?
Premium products have to bring a premium benefit. Premium is about more than a high price tag; the product or service quality must not only justify the high price tag but communicate the difference clearly on the website.
Do your product pages sell? In other words, are you getting visitors to them, but no one is buying?
Try selling at a cost price. This is not sustainable in the long term, but it will tell you if the price is putting people off in the short term.
- Is there social proof?
- Can you add more reviews, testimonials, and case studies to show that purchasers were happy and prosperous due to their purchase?
- Is there enough demand for this product or service? How do you know?
- Check to see if your competitors are running Google adverts for the phrases you are targeting, as this shows that these searches have commercial intent (i.e., result in purchases being made).
- Do you see successful competitors?
If you’re at a complete loss, then be sure you’ve asked yourself these questions.
Pay a target customer for honest feedback about what they do and don’t like. Taking an honest look like this can be painful. Ask for feedback from people far enough away from your business that they will tell you straight up.
And be sure to do these things:
If you still need help and need to figure out why you’re not making sales, then it’s time to contact us. Request a website and marketing review, and let’s get this turned around.
Only rely on your brand if you’re a new company. If you are a new brand, your brand equity is essentially zero, so you will have to work harder to sell your products than established competitors.
Run user tests and have testers analyze your site and your successful competitors’ websites. Keep the testers from knowing which website you run because you want their most honest feedback.
Add live chat, and see what people are asking about. This can guide you to the extra information you need to provide on your website and show you the common sticking points that visitors are facing.
Add an exit popup with a discount to tempt back those who have decided to leave.
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Ask for feedback from people far enough away from your business that they will tell you straight up. If not, is it clear that they are supposed to take the action you want them to take?
Is there enough demand for this product or service? Check to see if your competitors are running Google adverts for the phrases you are targeting, as this shows that these searches have commercial intent (i.e., result in purchases being made).
If you are a new brand, your brand equity is essentially zero, so you will have to work harder to sell your products than established competitors.
We offer a range of services to give your business an online presence, allowing you to focus your time and energy on the rest of your company, contact us at MySalesScript.com.
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