Why are visitors leaving your website? More to the point, why are they leaving without doing anything – like subscribing, inquiring or buying?

No business wants to lose a website visitor because that means a lost deal. When that happens often enough, you could be looking at revenues below your target.

You’ve done the work of trying to generate traffic to your website. If the challenge of turning every lead-generating traffic into a conversion has become impossible, then you need to look at what is causing this failure. 

Data from your website will present you with a full picture, giving you ideas for digital marketing solutions.

Know your website data, adjust your strategies

Data will tell you how your website visitors behave. It’ll also provide you with details on their location, age, which site they came from before landing on your site and other relevant information. In reviewing reports and analytics on what happens the moment a visitor clicks your site, you’ll be able to find out where the friction occurs and what to do about it. 

And in discovering the patterns and trends from your website, you can adjust marketing strategies that deliver better results.

1. Check your website traffic 

Not every traffic is valuable. Some will have more potential to become customers; others may only be ‘shopping around’. You’ll want to focus your energy on more valuable traffic, and you can identify them by finding out where your leads are coming from. 

Are they mostly coming from your social media pages? Maybe your pay-per-click ads are sending visits to your website? Do your emails bring in traffic as well?

Some of the best SEO tools provide analytics that’ll tell you where your leads are coming from. In getting this data, you can work more on landing pages that receive more valuable traffic. Optimize your lead generation process and you’ll be off to a good start in nurturing every visit that comes your way.

You can also go to your Google Search Console (GSC) to determine which pages are presenting the best potential for conversions and sales. 

2. Check your exit rate

Google Analytics (GA) monitors pages where the user last interacted; also known as the exit page. The exit page is very telling. It informs you what prompted the loss of a visit. Ideally, you’ll want your exit page to be the ‘contact us’ page or the ‘thank you’ page (if you have one) because that means the user likely completed an action. That they converted from being a visit to a lead and a potential customer.

But when your GA report tells you those aren’t the exit pages and your exit rate is high, you need to find out what is preventing that user from converting. Clearly, they were persuaded enough in the beginning. But something along their journey failed to maintain their interest.

Some elements you may want to look into:

• Complicated sign-up forms
• Weak calls to action
• Confusing pages; user has to go through too many steps
• Reviews or testimonials are inadequate
• Payment methods are limited
• Content isn’t sufficient or doesn’t address a need

Once you’ve determined which elements are causing the exits, fix them. Simplify your forms by asking for only a few details (e.g. name and email). Test your CTAs, including the color of the buttons. Provide more relevant content to satisfy and meet your users’ needs.

Another roadblock to your sales could be slow loading pages. Speed is a metric for search engines to rank websites because people have no patience for slow websites. When users leave a site due to load speed, it’s a signal to a search engine that a website isn’t optimized for user experience. So it’s seen as less useful as other websites.

Website speed isn’t just a factor for high exit rates; it also leads to high bounce rates, which is more significant. Bounce rates, unlike exit rates, are sessions without interaction.

So what do you do about your page speed?

• See if you have the right hosting solution; improve your server response time
• Optimize your images, especially if your site relies on visual content heavily
• Check the number of times users had to be redirected and reduce those incidences
• Optimize coding by minifying CSS, JavaScript

As Google rolls out its Core Web Vitals for an updated Page Experience, speed improvement is a key factor not just in engaging users on your site but also in successful SEO campaigns. Successful SEO means better ranking. And better ranking means better traffic.

3. Track your forms

Forms can stop users from continuing on with their journey on your website. If your forms suffer from the following:

• Lengthy and complicated
• Unresponsive design; forms aren’t functional on mobile devices
• Too many questions or requires irrelevant information
• Pop up ads 
• No assurance of security when users provide their data

When a user clicks on a form, they’re ready and primed to convert as customers. But if that form frustrates them, they will leave the page.

Use Google Tag Manager to track and analyze your forms. It’ll provide you with insights to nudge users through the sales funnel.

4. Check search trends

Consumers don’t want to be sold to right from the start. They want to know that your business can help them with their concerns. Your business must meet a need relevant to whatever you’re offering.

Find out what users are looking for in your site by recording the terms they’re searching. The information you get will help you:

• Add content users need but aren’t finding on your site
• Update content to provide recent details
• Improve your products or services

5. Do an SEO audit

Finally, do a full check up of your website. Is it optimized for search? Are there technical glitches that need to be resolved?

An SEO audit will reveal what improvements your website needs in terms of search engine visibility and providing the best possible user experience. The comprehensive report can give you actionable insights that will ensure no opportunity is lost again.

Never miss out on a sale thanks to website data

You’ve already done the work of encouraging users to check out your website. Make sure every valuable visit converts by unlocking data that reveals where frictions occur. Use that information to turn your site into a high-performing marketing machine that helps you meet sales and revenue targets.