Why Your Website Isn't Making Any Sales (and How To Fix It)

Key Takeaways

if you're frustrated that your website isn't selling as much as it could or should don't despair in this video we're gonna diagnose exactly what's going wrong I'm gonna show you some real-life examples and give you some suggestions to get things turned around and get your website performing as it needs to what's up ninjas and then jets Tim CK from exposure ninja here in this video we're gonna be answering the number one most common digital marketing question why isn't my website generating more sales for me why isn't my website selling more why isn't my website selling more now you might think there are loads of possible answers maybe my website sucks maybe my products suck maybe my business sucks maybe I personally am absolutely repulsive to customers and I suck luckily those last reasons are pretty rare in fact the most common reasons that our website and app forms are these number one it's just simply not getting enough traffic number two the offering that the business is presenting isn't compelling enough or isn't presented compelling enough or number three there is a conversion blocker so what I'm going to do is give you some metrics inside Google Analytics that you can run through a quick check to identify which of these is going to be the possible cause for you the first possible reason then that your site isn't performing as well as it should is traffic are you not getting enough traffic to your site so here's how you work out if traffic is the cause of your website woes what you need to do is find out how many visits your site is getting each month inside Google Analytics so let's just do some quick math here let's say that you're getting 1,000 visits per month to your site now what we've got to do is times that total number of visits by two percent okay so one thousand visits times two percent you cause 20 so that's how many leads or sales we will be getting from the website if it was converting 2% of those visits into customers right that's 2 percent conversion rate now if when you do this calculation a two percent conversion rate doesn't give you enough sales to be satisfied ie of getting a thousand visits I'm getting twenty leads or sales that's just not enough for me then what you need to do is you need to increase the amount of traffic that you're getting to your website because what you're saying is that even with a healthy conversion rate you're not getting enough leads and if that's the case you need to get more traffic so this isn't a video on how to get more traffic we've got loads of videos on the YouTube channel we've got webinars guides blogs podcasts on our website we even have some fantastic books including how to get to the top of Google and all of these will help you get more traffic to your site but basically there are two different types of traffic you've got paid traffic so this is traffic that you buy like with Google Ads or Facebook ads or YouTube hours or any ad platform or you've got traffic that you earn so this is traffic that you earn through increasing your ranking on Google or increasing your social media following and doing all that hard graft so these are the two different types of traffic so if your website was converting at 2% and that's not giving you the lead or sale volume that you need then my advice is to look at increasing your website's traffic now the caveat here is of course you can increase your conversion rate more than 2% we've got clients converting at 10 15 % even but the more you improve your conversion rate the more you hit this point of diminishing returns so always keep trying to improve your conversion rate but just realize that if you've got if you're getting a conversion rate of around 2% and you're not getting enough leads and he needs beginning more charge just to show you an example of a site where this is the main problem ie is not getting enough traffic here's a site where we've had over the last almost two months we've had a hundred and eight visits to the site so even if this site was converting at 2% that's still only two leads or sales which is not enough for this so this business needs to get more traffic to the website in fact we don't even know how well the traffic is performing a because they don't have conversion tracking setup and because they've got such low traffic volumes that you can't really get any meaningful data from this anyway so if you're another tix looks like this you need more traffic ok potential reason that your website is struggling number two is that your offering is not presented attractively enough ok so this means basically that it's not particularly clear what you offer or why people should buy it from you so a quick metric that you can use to identify if this could be an area of concern for you is to look inside Google Analytics at user engagement metrics so user engagement metrics are things like bounce rate average session duration or ASD or pages per session so these are user engagement metrics and these can be a great way to tell if people are actually just getting confused by your website and they're leaving so quick very very rough ballpark metrics if your bounce rate is over say 60% across all your traffic channels then usually there's a bit of an issue with the offering or how your website is presented which means that people are turning up and they go ah I don't understand or ah it's revolting and they're leaving ok so that's a big issue so you might be getting traffic but if your offering isn't presented nicely enough then you're gonna see a high bounce rate average session duration again it's gonna vary according to the site according to what you're offering but I would be mostly concerned if I'm seeing something less than say 1 minute 30 average session duration and then pages per session usually you'd be concerned if you're getting fewer than two pages per session on average now these are really rough ballpark figures but they're sort of nice quick benchmarks that you can use to understand if you're offering is confusingly presented now just to show you a couple of examples of websites where this is absolutely going to be an issue this first one here we're at logics resourcing com now I have no affiliation to this site I don't know the owner if you're watching I'm really sorry but I hope this is useful so when you first land on this site you see this scrolling banner here it says logics resourcing welcome to logics resourcing we bring a considered perspective and approach while successfully delivering to the unique challenges and needs of our clients the corporate speak any idea what this business does at all no it's impossible to understand what this business does now if you happen to be in the industry you know that resourcing means something to do with recruitment and I think it means recruitment because we've got some vacancies here but really there's absolutely no indication what this business does who do they work best with well we've got a whole bunch of really generic terms here development support support you can't really get any more generic than support management wow they recruit managers brilliant is that store managers is that software managers is that football managers right no information about this at all now some of these sentences are so generic you can actually use them for any business on the planet right we bring a considered perspective an approach what successfully delivering two unique challenges and needs of our clients you can say that about exposure ninja you could say that about the garage down the road you could say that about a personal trainer it's completely generic isn't it so they're talking in a totally generic way they're trying to not put anyone off and in doing so they're appealing to absolutely no one so that's a really good example of a site where the offering is just completely unclear here's another one h3 property so we know that there's something to do with property but we don't know what we don't know where they're based we can see in this testimonial says very professional company they look after your property with great care and attention I have no recommending them as one of the best rental agents I've used Donna compunction in a testimonial nice work but unfortunately the website does a terrible job of communicating what this business does the testimonial says something about rental agents but what about location I'm in Nottingham would they work with my properties who knows not me not them so really dreadful website they've given all this prominence their logo which I'm sure took them up solutely ages and cost a fortune but there's nothing to convert visitors in fact it doesn't even tell visitors what they're here to see so obviously these are really basic examples but often even for established businesses the offering can be presented in a much more compelling way the golden will with digital marketing is you can never be too obvious now if you think this might be an issue for your business one of the best things that you can do is get some user testing done and just simply ask the user testers what do you think this website is about now they're gonna give you all sorts of random rubbish that you're gonna be absolutely astounded by how could these people not know what this website is about it's completely obvious to me well to you yes because you built it and you know your business but to the members of the general public they might be completely unclear about what they do I guarantee that the person who built this website thinks it's really obvious what they do but we've just seen Hamwi we've got no idea at all and a word of warning about user testing actually use the testers are more sophisticated than the average Joe public because use the testers have actually been on to a user testing website installed all the software they know how to do this stuff that user I like to design in mind is either a granny or Homer Simpson but if you use a granny is your typical user you're going to be really clear about what this is because they're a bit unfamiliar with the computer they're a bit unfamiliar with the internet and they're a bit unfamiliar with your business and in that way they behave exactly like a potential customer okay the third possible reason that your website is underperforming is because it's got some serious conversion blockers so what is a conversion blocker a conversion blocker is something that is preventing someone who really wants to buy from actually being able to buy okay this sounds really painful and it's the lowest hanging fruit possible so let me give you some metrics so you can understand if this could be a potential cause of your website's woes so let's say that your website is getting enough traffic so if it was converting at 2% you'd be happy but it's not converting at 2% right as we've got enough traffic we've got some reasonably good user metrics so maybe your bounce rate is less than say 60% we might have good time on page or average session duration let's say that that is more than like a minute and a half but your conversion rate is less than 2% now for the most severe conversion rate blockers your conversion rate might be even less than 1% and if you like a laughs I'm gonna show you an example where the conversion rate is less than 0.1% so let's head over to Google Analytics and see what a site that suffering from conversion rate blockers looks like behind the scenes okay so here is a site that's getting a reasonable amount of traffic so we're looking here at about two and a bit months or two and a half months of data we're seeing 6,000 sessions the sites is 6,000 visits but only five sales so that's a conversion rate of 0.08 percent really really poor so what's going on and how can we see how to improve this bad boy well the user metrics are the first thing that we're gonna check so our people actually getting on with the site are they finding what they need well things actually look reasonably good with the user metrics yes we have an average bounce rate of 55 point eight nine which is slightly outside the bounce rate happy zone of forty to fifty percent but we can see that that's being skewed by social media traffic which tends to be the most fickle and low-quality traffic because everyone's in scrolling mode rather than buying mode so the other traffic channels are looking pretty healthy so between 40 and 50 percent which is exactly in our conversion rate happy zone the average pages per session also looking fairly good at two point four three and we've got an average people spending around two minutes on the site again we're pretty happy with that so why is the conversion rates so low well this is a clear sign that there are conversion rate blockers now in this example they're a luxury startup the trouble with being a luxury startup is that you're selling a high-end product with a high end price point but you don't have the brand cachet that people are gonna buy into the brand itself this is a classic mistake for luxury startups they see a brand like Gucci or Louis Vuitton and they say well they're charging X hundred pounds for a bag so I can charge X hundred pounds for a bag what they don't see is that Gucci and Louis Vuitton has been spending all this time and money over the years kind of working their way into everyone's psyches and positioning the brand as a start-up they just don't have that brand cachet so they can't make the sort of luxury high-end emotional purchase that of Louis Vuitton or Gucci can they have to make a much more logical purchase and explain to people why this is a good purchase now on this site they're taking a very luxury approach one product photo a small amount of text about the products and then a big fat price and they're just sticking it out there and hoping that someone buys it's just simply not enough online particularly if you're a startup you need to sell people better on why they need to purchase from you so it has to be lots of really good quality product photography including videos if you possibly can really detailed description of exactly what people are getting so you're justifying why the premium price is there and then if possible some kind of social proof like reviews star ratings that type of thing to let people know that this is a safe purchase even though it's more expensive than they might expect now here's another example of a site which has some user experience and version rate blockers so two of the issues that we've spoken about what we're looking at on this screen is the how the site is used on different devices so we can see that for example 50 percent of their traffic is coming from smartphones we've got 43 percent of the traffic coming from desktop computers let's look at how those two different sources compare so the bounce rate on mobile device is much much higher 77 percent so that's approaching the danger zone so people are hitting the site and they're going oh this doesn't look right so it's obviously something about how the site is presented on mobile which is limiting the performance on desktop is much better so 56% it's still a little bit high for desktop but not disastrous yet these metrics continue through two pages per session where we see that almost on mobile people are viewing almost half as many pages so something seriously going on here with the mobile visitors on the site three pages per session on desktop 1.67 on mobile the same with average session duration so one minute 30 on mobile almost 6 minutes on desktop so clearly people spending more time on the site on desktop so if I was owning this site I'd be looking at how the site is performing what's the mobile visitors first impression of the site what are they seeing as soon as they log in but even with all of this user engagement stuff there's still conversion blockers going on on this site we can see this by the massive difference in conversion rate 1.1 7 percent on desktop 0.41% on mobile so actually desktop traffic is performing about as well as we would expect at the lower end of what we do expect but it's still in the kind of conversion rate safe zone whereas mobile traffic really not performing at all so again look at the usability on mobile get that sort it at the moment they're running a lot of ads and traffic to both desktop and mobile and that mobile traffic just really not performing just not cutting it for them now one super quick conversion rate blocker area to take a look at is how easy it is for someone to take the action that you want them to take on the website and how clear are you about what they're supposed to do so here we can see a site for Isabelle Rowe who is a jewelry maker in London I would assume but actually there's no information on this homepage that would tell me that at all other than Isabel wrote London and the fact that we have some pictures of jewelry now this site is likely to have a very low conversion rate why because we're not being told what we're supposed to do at all there's no information about the business on the homepage whatsoever and there's no instruction for what we're supposed to do next I don't know for example from this page if Isabel accepts requests for bespoke rings and she designs bespoke rings I don't know if I need to go to a shop to see some of her products absolutely no fur at all so the chances of me reaching out and getting in contact are almost nil it doesn't to an extent matter what the ring looks like if I don't know what my relationship with Isabel is supposed to be I'm just simply not gonna convert I just don't have enough information to convert at all so what she could do instead is say if you're looking for a really special one-off handmade engagement ring for your details here to book a free consultation with me where we can look at some of your examples and give you a quote for the work now something like that is gonna take the conversion rate from 0% or as close to zero as you can get to perhaps one two three 5% so massive difference in the performance of the site just by giving people a very clear next step of what they're supposed to do next if we go back to our friends here the logics resourcing site again no clear next step I'm not told what this business is about and I'm not told what I'm supposed to do next either so what they could do to improve the conversion rate of this site once they've made it clear who they actually work with what they do where they're based now I think that their recruitment company for technical people right so if I was working on their site and I wanted to improve the conversion rate I would say recruiting technical people fill in your details here and we'll be in touch with a list of great quality applicants qualified for your job or fill in details here we'll be in touch to arrange a free consultation to understand how we can help you fill your job as quickly as possible with the best person for the role right really simple and that's going to take the conversion rate from very very low probably less than 1% here to maybe to 3% so if in doubt make it obvious so I hope that's helped you identify why your website isn't performing as well as it could or should do if you want some additional help to improve your website's leads and sales and you can request your free exposure ninja digital marketing review at exposure ninja comm forward slash review and we'll put a link in the description if you go to exposure ninja com4 slash review we'll ask you a few short questions about your business and your goals with your digital marketing one of our team will then record you a custom video showing you how to increase your lead and sales volume it's completely free of charge there's no obligation at all and the videos are really really useful I've had over 300 five-star reviews on Facebook we'll take a look at what you're doing to drive traffic at the moment what your competitors are doing we'll take a look at any ads that you've been running we'll have a look at your social media we'll see where you're ranking and we'll map you out a prioritized action plan that you can follow to increase the leads and sales that your site is generating so head over to exposure ninja comm forward slash review to request your review today and don't forget also subscribe to this channel click the little bell icon and then you'll be notified every time we upload more videos and if audio is more your thing then check out the exposure ninja digital marketing podcast where every week I interview some of the world's smartest digital marketing minds and they take us behind the scenes of a particular digital marketing strategy that they're using which is getting great results so check that out in the description below and don't forget to also follow us on social for more awesome content until next time see you in the next video