This time of the month is always interesting, as our monthly reporting kicks in to evaluate how well we are doing for our clients. Pleased to say that by and large we’ve seen some great traffic growth and reduced cost per visit across the board with SEO once again outstripping PPC nicely. (Always enjoy the internal battle against the PPC department :) )

Anyway, lets get onto topic, while a lot of the sites we work with are experiencing great traffic growth a lot of them “dont have design budget right now” to aid in increasing conversions. Let me first clarify that we in no way want that design budget, far from it, but in my opinion it is one of the most overlooked areas of a website. Site owners are always obsessed with driving increased number of visitors to a website before adequately understanding what current visitors are doing once they get there. Conversion analysis is key!

We have a financial client that, in this climate, experienced a 36% growth in March from organic search. Fantastic result for the team with the phrases very relevant to the service and great volumes for them too. Now, ordinarily we would be screaming from the rooftops only there is a problem. 70% bounce rate and not a single extra conversion. Not one, nada, zip, zilch…you get the very sad picture.

The reason is pretty easy to see, they are competing with some seriously well branded companies that have spent the cash on a great brand and a website that inspires trust. These guys went the cheap route and ended up with what they paid for. If your brand doesn’t scream trust in the financial sector, you should just go home, really, have a little lie down and shed a tear, or you will go mad. No one is going to use a cheap looking brand in that sector.

From our point of view it’s really deflating and annoying, not because it happened, but because it’s the 6th month that our reporting has indicated the massive bounce and low conversion rates and they haven’t done anything about it. “No budget for that right now”, they need to “keep things tight”. The tragedy is that the opportunity cost is probably 10X higher than a design cost.

You can talk until you’re blue in the face but in plain financial terms if you double your conversion rate you more than double your resultant profit because most of the resultant costs are fixed (trust me, I did accounts at varsity, don’t hold it against me). Double your profits, right now that’s gold isn’t it? You would think so.

So, is it the only one? Not on your life, we have 3 or 4 clients that have similarly dire conversion issues from very relevant traffic yet they “don’t have budget”, I’m thinking they won’t have a business soon let alone any design budget.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. On a more positive note, we have a great little client that has completely embraced the conversion optimisation route and started an MVT project with us. The goal is to reduce the exit rate from the e-commerce conversion funnel by 50% (it’s currently at a massive 70% of overall ecom). The ROI estimates on that mean an extra 20k in their back pocket per month, which, for a small business, is an amazing return. I’ll report back on that one next month, as I have very high hopes for them :) . He’s buying us a glider if we hit target too, I like nice clients…..

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