Which Pages Brought Enquiries This Year

A short list worth having before January

Most small business websites have dozens of pages. Usually a handful of them lead to most of the enquiries; the rest support them or simply sit there.

Owners tend to guess which ones they are, and the guess is usually the home page and whichever page they last paid to improve.

Analytics can answer more precisely, if it has been counting enquiries. Before the year closes, find that handful and write it down. Next year's website work should start there.

Where to look

• Landing pages with enquiry goals shown beside each one.
• Reverse Goal Path, listing the pages read just before an enquiry.
• Phone taps recorded as events, page by page.
• Search Console, showing which pages bring searchers and for what.
• Callers' own answers about what they were reading.

The second is the report most owners have never opened. The landing page is where a visit started; the pages just before the enquiry are what persuaded somebody to ask.

Check the counting first

None of this works if the goals were not counting properly all year.

Look at the goal's completions month by month. A run of zeros usually means a broken form or a thank-you page that moved, not a quiet spell, and those months should be treated as missing.

Send a test enquiry and watch it arrive in the real-time report. Then read the year knowing which parts of it can be trusted.

Landing pages and goals together

Open the Landing Pages report and set the date range to this year. In the conversions columns, choose the goal that counts enquiries.

Sort by goal completions. The top of the list shows the pages on which enquiring visits most often began.

Look at the conversion rate beside each, but be wary of small numbers. A page with four visits and one enquiry has a striking rate and tells you almost nothing.

The pages read just before

The Reverse Goal Path report, among the goals reports, shows the last three pages people viewed before each enquiry.

It often surfaces a different set: a price list, a page about how the work is done, a gallery, a page answering common questions.

These pages rarely bring visitors in. They are where visitors decide, which makes them as important as the pages that attract the traffic.

A worked example

An architectural millwork shop builds custom cabinetry, staircases, panelling and reception desks for builders, designers and homeowners.

The owner assumed the home page and the gallery did most of the work. Both had cost the most to build, and both drew the most visits.

With the quote form's goal selected, the Landing Pages report told a different story. Enquiring visits most often began on a short page about commercial reception desks and on a blog post from 2016 about choosing wood for stair treads.

Reverse Goal Path added a third: a plain page explaining how a project runs, with typical lead times, which appeared just before many of the quote requests.

Each answered a specific question for a specific buyer. Next year's list starts with them: new photographs for the reception desk page, an update to the stair tread post, and current lead times on the process page.

Calls are enquiries too

For many local businesses, more enquiries arrive by phone than by form, and a call leaves no trace in Analytics unless it has been set up to.

Analytics can count every tap on the phone number as an event, which shows the pages phone visitors called from. Calls dialled by hand from a desktop screen cannot be traced that way.

So ask. For a month, ask new callers which page they had open when they decided to ring, and note it on a sheet by the phone. That fills much of the gap.

What Search Console adds

Analytics shows where enquiring visits began. Search Console shows how people found those pages in the first place.

Its Performance report lists the searches that brought visitors to each page, with up to sixteen months of history. Look up each page on your short list and read the searches beside it.

They are often not the searches the owner would have guessed, and they show what each page is really being found for. Next year's improvements should protect that.

Reading the list honestly

Paid visits can distort it. A page used as the landing page for an ad campaign will sit high because of the budget behind it, so look at it with paid traffic separated.

The home page appears near the top on most sites simply because most visits start there. Compare its rate with other pages before crediting it.

And a page with three enquiries all year is not a trend, however high it sits on a short list.

Pages with visits and no enquiries

The same reports expose pages that bring plenty of visitors and almost no enquiries.

Some are doing a different job, such as directions or hours for existing customers. Others rank for searches by people who will never buy, such as homeowners looking for instructions to do the job alone.

Do not delete them. Decide which job each is doing, and where it should point a reader who might become a customer. That is next year's second task.

The counter-case

A site that receives a few enquiries a year cannot produce a meaningful ranking of pages. Asking each customer how they found you will teach more.

A site where goals were never set up has no history to read. The useful step is to set them up now, so that next December the list exists.

And a site launched this autumn has too little behind it. Wait for a full year.

Everyone else should spend an hour this month finding the handful of pages that did the work.

Before the year ends

1. Confirm the goal counted all year.
2. Open Landing Pages with the goal selected.
3. Open Reverse Goal Path for the same goal.
4. Add phone taps and callers' answers.
5. Write down the five pages that did most.
6. Note the question each one answers.
7. Put those pages first in next year's plan.

Step six is the one that turns a list into a plan. Knowing which question a page answers tells you how to improve it, and which other pages still lack an answer of their own.

Making sure goals and campaign tags were recording before a busy day is covered in Black Friday tracking before the day.

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.