Sales Slump? How to Get Better Results from Your Website Visitors

Most manufacturers have experienced sales slumps at one time or another. When it happens, it’s vital to get your sales team’s heads back in the game and find a solution to the problem. The company’s website is one of the first places you can look for clues to the problem. Here are some things you can do to discover how well the site is working for you and how you can achieve conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Set Up Google Analytics

Getting the right data is the first and most important step to determine how effective your website is at generating sales. Setting up Google Analytics—which is free, by the way—will help you to track the number of website visitors you get and where they come from. You can see how many people are on the site at any given time, the countries and cities they are visiting from, and the devices they are using to access it. You’ll also be able to monitor how they navigate around your site, which gives you insight into their interests and helps you to learn more about them.

Here’s a Step-by-Step guide on How to Set Up Google Analytics

Check Your Bounce Rate

Once your Google Analytics account is set up and functional, one of the things you’ll be able to check is the bounce rate. This metric shows the percentage of website visitors who leave your site without taking an action, such as clicking on a link, making a purchase, or filling out a contact form. Every website loses some visitors, but a high bounce rate can be a sign that your content isn’t hitting the right spot or answering potential customers’ questions well enough to generate leads.

An average bounce rate of less than 25% is ideal for a manufacturing website, but it’s still acceptable if yours is in the 41% to 55% range. Anything higher than 56% is too high, and could indicate that your site isn’t capturing your target audience’s interest.

Determine Why You Lose Visitors

So why are people coming to your website in the first place but then leaving without doing anything further? Thanks to your Google Analytics, you can look for the answers to these questions:

1. Do you have a slow, steady decline in website visitors, or are there particular dates/times when you see more of a drop?
2. Where do most of your visitors come from, and are they new or returning visitors?
3. What keywords are visitors searching for, and where do they land on your site? Are your landing pages optimized to grab their attention and steer them towards taking action?
4. How does your current traffic compare with previous periods (last week, last month, last year)?
5. Where do visitors mostly leave the website from? If it’s a particular page, take a long hard look at that page. Make sure it contains quality content created for CRO and that it’s working correctly.

Some reasons for your loss of website visitors could include ineffective SEO, not enough quality information that answers prospective customers’ questions, or a lack of compelling calls to action. When you know what’s missing on your site, you can address these issues and improve them.

Improve the User Experience

A positive user experience (UX) is essential for achieving robust conversion rate optimization. A powerful UX goes way beyond an attractive website design. If your site doesn’t give users what they expect and help them make the right choices, you’re likely to lose out on potential sales.

Some tried-and-tested ways to improve your website’s UX include:

• Enhancing the quality of your content and making sure it’s relevant to where your website visitors are in their buying journey.
• Using A/B testing to discover what landing pages and incentives work the best, and then maximizing your use of these.
• Checking that your website design is responsive on all types of devices and that everything loads correctly and at a reasonable speed.
• Making sure that your site contains simple, intuitive ways for visitors to place orders or to contact you.

Don’t accept digital sales that are anything less than the best. Just by making these small changes to your CRO efforts, you can get better results from your website visitors, move out of your sales slump, and boost your company’s annual revenue.

Fill out the form below to start your customized CRO program today.

Catch-up on our other articles about Conversion Rate Optimization:

…and find more from our “Learn from the Pros” webinar series on the CRO topic.