One of the most common “strategies” we’re asked to develop is based around increasing traffic to a client’s site.

Traffic is measurable. Traffic is easy to understand as a single metric to see if it increases or decreases. It’s something a lot of people talk about (thank God we’re not talking “hits” anymore). So therefore, it often becomes a metric of success. The reality is, traffic is a vanity metric. In other words, it lacks real value if it’s not connected to a measurable action that impacts the business or organization’s bottom line.

We were recently tasked with increasing traffic for a client. The first thing I wanted to do was to review the analytics to understand how much traffic they were getting, where the traffic was coming from, where they were going, what actions they were taking, etc. As I began to understand the situation more, the reason for increasing traffic was to generate more leads. The thought was, for example, if the math equation works as 25% of the traffic coming to the site converts to leads, generating more traffic will naturally mean more leads.

While that IS the case, the data gave me another picture. I discovered, through the paths visitors were navigating on the site, that the user path had a 42% conversion rate. In other words, 42% of users would go to the homepage and go down the path to the conversation page (i.e. lead form) and fill it out.

Most companies would be high-fiving the client because a 42% conversion rate is great! But, I looked at it from the opposite angle. We had a 42% conversion rate, but that also meant we had a 58% abandonment rate. Yes, 58% of the traffic coming to the page would not fill it out or call, even though they showed intent through their series of actions.

This led me to the conclusion that we did not have a traffic problem, we had an abandonment problem. Doing the math, we discovered if we could decrease the abandonment rate by just 10%, it would mean millions of dollars for the client.

So, that’s what we’ve done. We’ve implemented a series of multi-variant and A/B testing based on a series of design and user experience (UX) updates to measure the overall success. As of the time of this writing, we’re discovering 2 of our tests are outperforming the original form page (the control) by more than double! We are doing another series of testing, but everything is looking very promising.

I write about this to showcase an example of MINDSCAPE’s thinking and the value we put on data and what it means to our clients. We use data to influence decisions for user experience (UX), programming, and marketing. It’s important for your company to take this same approach. Be sure you’re strategizing around the right metric and use as much real data, not opinion, as possible.

Once we have the full experience completely optimized, we’ll look at increasing the quality of traffic that’s coming to the site. Then we can be confident we’re maximizing the digital opportunity with every visitor.

I hope this helps!