Friday, 30 March - 22:55 Category: Formulae for Profits

Visits vs Leads = Profits, How So?

SYNOPSIS:  Working out the visitor to lead ratio provides you with a yardstick for determining your website's current value and future profitability.

Here is a simple process to help you understand how successful your website really is. 

Take the number of people who visit your website and the number of people who make contact (four example, filling in a contact form, phoning up, buying from your site).  Now write down the numbers side-by-side as a ratio.  Let's say that in a one month period 1000 people visit your site and you get 20 leads.  Therefore, the ratio of visits:leads is 50:1. 

So here's my question to you: If you could double the number of people visiting your site wouldn't it stand to reason that you would double the number of enquiries? 

I hope you can see that this ratio is critically important to understanding how successful your website really is and just how much money you will be able to make from it at its current visit:lead ratio.  You may have a website which has very few visitors but generates a huge number of leads (a low visit:lead ratio).  Alternatively, you may have vast armies of visitors to your website but very few leads (a high visit:lead ratio).  Interestingly, you would handle these two situations very differently.  In the former you would work all-out to increase the number of visits, emphasising search engine optimisation, pay per click, article generation, PR and so forth.  Essentially, doing everything you can to increase the number of visits.  In the latter scenario where you've got lots of visitors but few leads the problem probably lies with your website and you should then work to improve its content, invitation to action, design quality, etc. 

I'm sure you can see the criticality of this information so let me give you a couple of guideline ratios to help you understand where you are. 

If your visit to lead ratio is 100:1 then you are about average.  Anything over 10:1 and you are doing really well.  If you start dipping beneath the 100:1 average line then it's time to assess whether the website is either a) not attracting the right visitors or b) not incentivising people to act. 

And who said statistics was boring!

Discover how interesting statistics really are!

Posted By:Jed Wylie on Fri, Mar 30th 2007, 22:55