To understand why your conversion rate is low, you first need to understand what the potential of top converting landing pages. At Funnel Science, we expect landing pages to be able to achieve 10% or higher conversion rate on leads or sales. Our standard though is at 20%, meaning 1 in every 5 clicks is converting into a lead or sale. To be able to achieve above average or industry leading conversions, you must be a/b and multivariate testing.
Out of more than 250 companies that I have consulted with getting more website visitors and improving the conversion rate, here are the top reasons why your conversion rate is underperforming:
- Not Tracking Correctly. You simply can not manage what you do not measure. If you measure incorrectly, you will optimizely the wrong keywords and pages. The wrong metrics for conversion tracking are events or actions that do not generate the direct potential for a purchase. To win online, you must have a conversion rate of at least 10% on lead generation campaigns or 6% on ecommerce sales.Conversions are not time on site goals or viewing a page, those are KPI’s aka Key Performance Indicators.
- Your conversion rate is low because you setup a poor online business and it is not winning the popularity contest.Yes, it is like we are in high school again. Expect this time, our livelihoods are on the line.
Winning the popularity contest in digital channels like PPC, SEO and Social means showing up on top, looking great, showing up on top at the right time, with the right message and one of the best product offerings. If you do not do all four of those, someone better than your brand, your competitors are only milliseconds away by clicking the back button.
- The people you have managing your marketing, website & analytics do not have the experience or expertise. This is one of the leading causes of poor conversion rates.
Many times, its the fault of the leader because they are a “penny wise and a pound foolish” and have outsourced communications work offshore. If you have an Indian company creating your marketing design and content and you are selling in the U.S., you will have shitty conversion rate.
People are the driving force in marketing and sales. People sell to people. The low conversion rate is ultimately a people connecting to people problem. Your website and landing pages should be thought of as online sales people.
What do you do with a sales guy that can’t cut it?
- Not setting up best practices and wasting money on irrelevant traffic and customers who are less than ideal.
- Poor landing pages. Yes, it is the last on this list and is often the problem for a low conversion rate but not the leading problem. What is remarkable though, the majority of 3rd parties in the community that we see creating landing pages, have never been trained in lead generation or ecommerce. So the problem in poor landing page performance is actually caused by what we identified in bullet 3.
This also includes using A/b testing tools that create landing pages on the fly with very little effort in actually making 1 great landing pages. Instead, the tools generate a ton of crappy landing pages. Crap multiplied by Crap is still Crap.
If you send a lot of traffic to a website with a low conversion rate, more visitors will not help get better performance. In fact, a low conversion rate is so dangerous, depending on how much it is costing you, you could be causing your business to go bankrupt. Low conversion rates and high number of visitors is a very dangerous position for your business.To a large degree, it means you are failing and have yet to reach the true potential.
