Traffic That Was Never Going to Convert

Doing the split in advance

Most businesses discover which of their traffic was worthless only when it disappears and nothing happens.

Doing the same analysis before anything changes turns a future alarm into a shrug, and it takes about half an hour.

It also tells you where your effort belongs now, which is worth considerably more than the reassurance.

The exercise is to divide your traffic into groups by what the visitor was trying to do, and then find out what each group produced.

The four groups

• Ready to hire: your name, or service plus place.
• Comparing: prices, options, how to choose.
• Researching: what is this, how does it work.
• Unrelated: arrived by accident.

The first two produce nearly all enquiries in most small businesses. The third produces recognition and occasional work much later. The fourth produces nothing and is frequently a substantial share of the total.

Doing it with what you already have

Since this needs no new tools.

Open your landing page report and list your top fifteen pages by arrivals.

Assign each to one of the four groups, which takes a minute per page and is usually obvious.

Then get the enquiries attributable to each, from your form records, your call log, or by asking people where they found you.

Even a rough count is enough, since the differences between groups are usually large rather than marginal.

Write the result down, since this is the baseline the whole exercise exists to produce.

A worked example

A business with about two thousand visits a month sorted their fifteen busiest pages.

Two pages were ready-to-hire and accounted for about a fifth of traffic and nearly all enquiries.

Three were comparing, another fifth, and produced the rest.

Eight were researching, accounting for over half the traffic and two enquiries in a year.

Two were unrelated entirely, ranking for something adjacent, producing nothing.

So sixty per cent of their traffic was producing almost nothing, which meant a substantial fall in the total would have been survivable and a small fall in the right fifth would not.

What the split changes

Beyond the reassurance, which is the smaller benefit.

It tells you which pages to protect, improve, and watch, which is a short list rather than the whole site.

It tells you which pages can be left alone, merged, or allowed to decline without concern.

It gives you a defensible answer when somebody proposes work aimed at increasing traffic in general.

And it makes any future movement interpretable, since a fall in the researching group means something different from a fall in the hiring group.

That last is what turns a monthly figure into information.

The unrelated group is worth finding

Since it is usually invisible and sometimes large.

A page ranking for a phrase that means something else in another context, another industry, or another country.

Those visitors arrive, find nothing relevant, and leave, which inflates your traffic and depresses every average you look at.

Find them by looking at which queries bring people to your least engaging pages.

There is usually nothing to do about it except know it is there, so that every average and every total you look at afterwards is read correctly.

Researching traffic is not worthless

Which is the necessary qualification.

It builds recognition, attracts links, and reaches people who will need you eventually.

The mistake is treating it as equivalent to hiring traffic in a report, which is what a single visits figure does.

Value it, at a lower rate, and stop measuring it as though it were the same thing.

Where a researching page also carries a route to the next step, it converts better than the group average suggests, which is worth checking before dismissing any of them.

Redo it annually

Since the mix moves.

A new page can shift the balance considerably, and a page that changes its ranking can move between groups.

Once a year is enough, and it is quicker the second time because the assignments are already made.

Keep the results alongside your monthly figures so the two can be read together.

And note the date, since comparing two of these across a year is where the real information sits rather than in either one alone.

Ask people where they found you

Since the attribution in any analytics is incomplete and the direct question is not.

Add one line to your enquiry form or your first reply asking how they came across you, in plain words rather than a dropdown.

The answers are frequently different from what the figures suggest, particularly the share who say a recommendation, a van, or a sign, none of which appears anywhere in a report.

Over a hundred enquiries that becomes the most honest picture of where your work comes from that you will ever have.

It also puts the website in proportion, which for many small businesses turns out to be a smaller share than the effort spent on it implies.

The counter-case

The groups are not clean.

A single page frequently serves two groups, and somebody researching in March hires in September, which no attribution captures.

Small businesses also have enquiry numbers too low to divide reliably across four groups, so the split is directional rather than precise and should be read that way.

And treating researching traffic as worthless leads to abandoning content that was building something slowly.

The purpose of the split is to read your figures correctly rather than to justify deleting half your pages.

Sort your fifteen busiest pages into four groups, count what each produced, and write the result down.

The half hour

1. List your top fifteen landing pages.
2. Assign each to one of four groups.
3. Count enquiries from each.
4. Note the traffic share per group.
5. Identify the pages to protect.
6. Write it down with the date.
7. Repeat annually.

Step four is the number that matters, since knowing that sixty per cent of your traffic produces almost nothing changes how you read every report you will see for the next year.

Why the enquiry figure is the one to watch is covered in counting enquiries instead of visits.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.