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How Many Potential Buyers Are Visiting Your Website?
Yesterday, Jeff Sexton blogged about the importance of watching your cost per visitor (CPV) and revenue per visitor (RPV) trends. One of the best ways to get a handle on optimizing these key performance indicators is to get a better sense of your traffic mix.
Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.
There are 3 types of visitors who can come to your website:
1. Buyers – you know who they are because they converted to a sale or lead.
2. Potential Buyers – these are visitors who are in the market for what you offer, but for any number of possible reasons, don’t buy. They may be at earlier stages in the buying process, doing research to sell it internally, not adequately persuaded, driven away by bad usability, etc. The upshot is, there are countless number of changes/improvements you can test and make to bump these visitors from potential into actual buyers.
3. Disqualified Traffic – these are visitors who wouldn’t buy no matter what (maybe they arrived to your website by accident – they typed shingles and were looking for the medical condition not what you put on roofs, or maybe they don’t have the type of budget your product or service needs, etc.).
On a typical website, 3% of visitors are Buyers and the other 97% is distributed among the Potential Buyers and Disqualified traffic. You should be asking yourself these 2 key questions:
1. Of your non-buyers what percent are potential buyers? And how can you increase those?
2. What marketing efforts are bringing ample amounts of traffic, but with poor quality traffic – i.e., what’s driving a disproportionate amount of disqualified traffic?
Your web analyst should be able to tell you the answers to these questions.
The opportunity to increase sales is in:
- understanding that 97% of non-buying traffic better,
- bringing in less Disqualified traffic and more Potential Buyers, and
- More effectively turning those Potential Buyers into Buyers.
For example, if you look at the top converting retail websites, one of the key reasons they have such high conversion rates (way above 3%) is their intense focus on bringing back repeat customers. Note: You should subscribe to each of their newsletters to see some of what they are doing!
What you should do next:
- Find your expert (if you have them) and coordinate their efforts to get it done.
- Educate your team and then coordinate their efforts to get it done.
- This is what we do, if you would like you can talk to us.
About the author
Bryan Eisenberg, founder of FutureNow, is a professional marketing speaker and the co-author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books Call to Action and Waiting For Your Cat to Bark and Always Be Testing. You can friend him on Facebook or Twitter.
More articles from Bryan Eisenberg
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
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June 3rd, 2009
3:46 pm
I totally agree. I am into the affiliate business, and I have a lot of “Potential Buyers”, who will return, when (and if) they have decided to buy. So you just have to make sure, they take the right decision.
June 4th, 2009
9:27 am
How would your web analyst be able to tell you what percentage of your non-buyers are potential buyers?
June 4th, 2009
9:51 am
There are several criteria that we use including reviewing keyword/search visits but ultimately it is in reviewing visitor activity and clearly defining criteria for each.
June 4th, 2009
10:25 am
Interested to know what those criteria are, seems to me like you could have an interested user landing on a product page and bouncing due to some on site issue or just because they dont want to buy at that time. Maybe in that case they have a good time on site? It just seems a little grey to me
June 4th, 2009
11:09 pm
Having the right tools for this is critical. Generally speaking, web analytics tools aren’t going to give you this type of insight into your visitors. Without it, however, finding where the real issues are becomes much more of a guessing game.
If you can see a marketing effort isn’t bringing buyers, it is pretty clear what to do–kill it. If a marketing effort is bringing potential buyers that aren’t buying, the issue is with the content failing to persuade them. The gray area in all of this is the people behind each visitor. Even those that have the potential to buy still have different motivations, personalities, and objections.
If the objective is more leads or more sales, FutureNow’s OnTarget is the only solution that has the right ingredients: the Persuasion Architecture methodology that provides the framework for persuading; the critical tools that uncover who visitors are and why they aren’t being persuaded; and the human expertise to analyze and convert that into the specific direction needed to fix it. Not to shamelessly promote it, but check it out!
June 5th, 2009
2:24 am
How do you monitor all these visitors? I use analytics and it helps a lot. I just started reading your blog and my question could sound dumb now.
June 7th, 2009
11:50 am
Has anybody experimented with “pop away” boxes. You know those annoying boxes when you leave a website that throw a popup in front of you and make you fill out a question before leaving? Seems like a horrible annoyance to me, but I wonder if it provides those merchants using it special insight into why customers are leaving? Is it worth it?
June 8th, 2009
6:11 pm
This is a great article.
It made me realize that sure if I have 100 visitors coming to my site using the word tea (we sell chai tea) and out of 100, 95 leave the site without looking at another page, that should be a reason for me to not use that particular keyword, even though it brings a lot of traffic.
TRaffic is easy to get, converting traffic is where the money is
Property Man: I would suggest using a survey tool by http://www.4qsurvey.com/ its less invasive and I’ve been able to gather a lot of feedback from visitors. I will not use a PopUp.
June 11th, 2009
7:44 am
I completely agree.The most important thing in online business is the Potential Buyers.IF you are not getting any than all of your efforts are in VAIN.All your Internet Marketing Efforts should be focused on getting Potential Buyers than other Stuff.
June 11th, 2009
11:07 am
[...] a search engine and they were looking for roof repairs and not skin conditions. This is obviously a disqualified visitor. Did they try to purchase fromm your website and something went wrong? Did they have problems [...]
June 15th, 2009
12:50 am
[...] How Many Potential Buyers Are Visiting Your Website? [...]
June 15th, 2009
7:44 pm
[...] Bryan Eisenberg, “How Many Potential Buyers Are Visiting Your Website? Grokdotcom, June 3, 200… Share and [...]
June 23rd, 2009
7:02 pm
[...] Eisenberg recently wrote a post entitled “How many potential buyers are visiting your website?” In his post, he suggests that once you filter out the 3% of visitors who convert, the [...]
June 30th, 2009
12:08 am
According to my stats, about %40 of my purchases are from returning users – a pretty important thing to notice in your conversion rates.
July 2nd, 2009
1:49 am
The percentage of disqualified visitor is always negligible and yes increasing traffic also increases potential buyers if not buyers.
July 4th, 2009
3:09 am
Organic traffic is the key.Spending on advertising and not getting much potential buyers is a loss.Well the number of potential buyers does not represent the true story of your success.It is the number of conversions which matters.
July 8th, 2009
9:24 am
great article, which explain traffic troubles but i would say always Organic traffic right way to get more visitors.
August 12th, 2009
11:49 am
If you have some quality traffic and some good exposure for your products i think that you casn improve your RPV a lot.
You must not forget that the people who read you and get on your site are always looking for something, (excepting those that got there by accident) so the key is to sell them what they want and what their searching for.
August 15th, 2009
5:46 pm
The most difficult part isn’t knowing how to do all this, it’s actually *doing* the work to get those customers, brainwave entrainment
August 18th, 2009
10:05 am
That´s the most important question to do! I have seen often people optimizing their sites for a very generic keywords, with little relevance for their business. The majority of people are interested only by the volume of searches generated, but forget the conversions. Therefore, we see sites with good traffic, but with low conversions and high bounce rates.
August 21st, 2009
2:52 pm
Joseph, that’s a lucky case.. you can change things anytime using a good strategy, but investing to start all over again will mean disaster!
September 3rd, 2009
5:09 am
Agree with Joseph.. Time again running SEO for people they come to me with generic keywords when the budget and sites focus should not be goig for that. Its up to us to educate though isnt it, and often use the personal data we have to target correctly.
I use all medium from Twitter to standard Organic SEO for visitors all about the blend for me.
Jay ‘Little House’
September 11th, 2009
8:31 am
Getting accurate figures are the most important part in the entire process. Ensuring that you are being able to record what is happening with the traffic is the only way you can start towards improving the overall results. Find an expert, that really is the best way and for the cost return when it is done right you can’t go wrong.
September 18th, 2009
5:09 am
For me, it’s all about conversions and focusing on what is working & then trying to replicate what works with new phrases.
September 19th, 2009
7:46 am
I notice that many of the web businesses that do do well have improved their overall rankings and getting to the top of those search lists is the most important part, once you are there the focus has to be on conversion and improvement. I guess without the help of the experts with your promotion it is a bit of a catch 22 to provide the good service if nobody can find you!
September 24th, 2009
8:58 am
I think the best way to improve RPV is to make some constant changes in Your website. But don`t crazy with it, one at a time. Test it, look at the numbers, tweak it, repeat. Observe webpage from top converting retail websites. Man, those webpage are results of years of tweaking. I learn alot from them. Their newsletters are great when you want learn fast from the best.
September 27th, 2009
3:29 pm
Getting targeted traffic has to be the most important aspect. If you visitors that are interested in your products then all you need to do is concerntrate on converting them. And like doradztwo said you have to change and tweek things to see what gets the best results.
Everything taks time online if you want to get it right.
October 7th, 2009
2:24 am
I agree bringing in targeted traffic gives a higher percentage of conversion. Social traffic are pretty useless. In my case, my stats indicated that the hits I got from the longer tails are the ones that are have the higher rate of conversion.
October 10th, 2009
10:30 am
I think you need to plan each website out with all the long tail keywords in place, create a page on each long tail keyword. This creates huge amounts of content which is loved by search engines. If this is all set up correctly then as soon as you start building quality links the traffic will come quickly.
October 12th, 2009
6:01 am
I believe it is a tech and new technology to be tracked.
October 12th, 2009
11:59 am
Best traffic/buyers are coming from google , so for me optimizing your website for google is first step for one website.
October 15th, 2009
11:56 am
Thanks Bryan. I’ve learned quite a bit from maintaining subscriptions with the retailers I find most effective. Seeing the methods they use to coax repeat business has been extremely useful for me in increasing my buyer conversions.
October 16th, 2009
11:48 am
I totally agree with ensuring you get quality traffic to your site, provides better conversions. I always work with long tail, better conversion stats. Local business maps are great for getting instant exposure, if you know how to use them
October 18th, 2009
5:23 am
Excellent article.
this is a good question that you have asked.
I have seen a lot of people optimized their sites with little relevance for their business.
Thanks for the sharing
October 18th, 2009
3:11 pm
How to check who are buyer or non buyer.
October 19th, 2009
6:02 am
Foolish article
October 20th, 2009
11:37 am
Interesting post. It depends how you track your sales. Do you have a last click method or are you tracking email and phone sales as well. The all effect the cost per sale method.
October 20th, 2009
4:43 pm
I do not see why this is a foolish article. I mean without targeted traffic hitting your website you may as well not have a site
October 20th, 2009
11:58 pm
There are several criteria that we use including the review of keyword search and visits, but is ultimately in the review of visitor activity and a clear definition of criteria for each.
October 21st, 2009
3:31 am
This is a great article, it speaks the truth about traffic
October 30th, 2009
4:33 pm
I have like no buyers on my website – so I wonder if that’s a case of potential buyers not buying or all of my traffic is composed of non-buyers. What do you think?
November 11th, 2009
1:12 am
Well yeah this is great article, not foolish at all. Targeted traffic is extremely important for your website if you want success.
November 12th, 2009
12:46 am
You need to make your marketing strategy according your target audience. You should always try to get the potential user.
November 12th, 2009
9:36 am
Come on LEO LEO LEO
November 12th, 2009
9:44 am
Good content and well-presented web page can invite potential buyers on your site.
November 16th, 2009
12:36 am
The percentage of visitors disqualified always yes, and slightly increase the purchasing capacity, if not purchased.
November 20th, 2009
12:48 pm
This is a great article.
November 27th, 2009
12:17 pm
Always test and measure. Watch the google trifecta video. amazing stuff.
December 6th, 2009
5:25 am
The ROI is 0.1% in my site, really low…
December 8th, 2009
6:22 am
Nobody visits my site. I’m trying to learn how to get people there first. However I have found this article very interesting and I’ve learnt a lot from it.
December 8th, 2009
9:07 am
Well, because each bussiness should be treated different than other, the main thing you have to do to your website is o good tracking tool. You have to see what your visitor wants, where he comes in and where he comes out. Check the keywords, and check how relevant and how convincing is your web page to visitor. And then make changes, results will be in rising the RPV.
December 9th, 2009
12:49 am
I use google analytics content to see from which pages the visitors left and how many visitors check contact page to know they visit by random or really want to buy something
December 9th, 2009
9:11 pm
I use analytics from google for my website and I am happy with the way they provide the stats. Then I make the calculation to see how many purchase.
December 10th, 2009
3:01 pm
This is a great thing to know, thanks for the help.
December 11th, 2009
4:32 pm
Well, studying how an user interact with your website, is the most important think when you are selling things online. People are different and understanding them needs is the key of succes. traking tools tolds a lot about them
December 12th, 2009
1:00 pm
The most difficult thing i think is to be able to identify who is a potential buyer. The analysis should always begin with examining the keywords that bring the traffic. Also checking demographics helps.
December 16th, 2009
8:59 am
Thats looks like an interesting idea. I think using different phone numbers and email address also helps track those who have come via your website
January 1st, 2010
3:29 pm
Thanks for the great tips!
January 4th, 2010
7:57 am
I noticed that I had a boatload of traffic come back to my site this new year, who previousley must have bookmarked my site during December.
January 4th, 2010
8:49 pm
The big question is how do you drive more traffic to your site. Thats the biggest struggle.
January 8th, 2010
11:43 am
It is hard work to turn potential buyers to buyers because 3% of visitors are buyers.
January 12th, 2010
11:54 am
There are several criteria that we use including the review of keyword search and visits, but is ultimately in the review of visitor activity and a clear definition of criteria for each.
January 14th, 2010
5:28 am
it is necessary to analyse the traffic for a website.Not all traffic are qualifed and few around 3% are only qualified.
January 15th, 2010
9:03 am
For a website, the first target to get traffic on its website . once it achievd the goal, it time to analyse the potential visitors on the website where they promote the porducts or the information solutions.
January 16th, 2010
12:45 pm
traffic is very important for a website and moreover qualified traffic is also considered to be one of the factor.
January 19th, 2010
3:59 am
thanks for the hard work
January 20th, 2010
2:14 am
For me, it’s all about conversions and focusing on what is working & then trying to replicate what works with new phrases.
January 20th, 2010
12:38 pm
CPV & RPV are the show card of your business in a website.It can be improved by attracting targeted traffics.
January 20th, 2010
3:50 pm
Its very nice article related to potential visitors to your site, I found it very helpful for me. Thanks for sharing it.
January 23rd, 2010
9:06 am
it is very informative shared. Traffic is very important for a website and after that qualified visitors count.
January 24th, 2010
1:13 am
hi mate this is interesting article will make sure I check your posts more often! Really interesting articles.If anybody has an interesting articles you can share with me.Any way Ill be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon.thanks for sharing good info.regards,
January 24th, 2010
3:35 am
While this isn’t usually a big issue for investment properties, try to remove all items that are unusual or attract attention to themselves.
January 24th, 2010
8:41 am
well all we know traffic on a website is very important factor. After then, qualified visitors counts apart from the disqualified visitors. It is very important aspect to return the qualified visitors for the website
January 25th, 2010
4:39 am
It is of course very important to bring potential customers to its site to
just traffic alone will not bring
January 25th, 2010
10:26 am
Getting the traffic on the websitr is very hard job. After then convert the visitors into qualified is the next step.
January 25th, 2010
9:17 pm
One way to ensure that you sell your home and you do it fast is to use an auctioneer. They will advertise and hold the auction for you and they will nearly guarantee that your home will sell.
January 26th, 2010
5:54 am
Maketing is one of the effective way by which you can boost your traffic online and you can also get your potential customers. Great info
January 31st, 2010
6:17 am
There are lots of site marketing for online business. Its better which site is genuine and trustworthy and needs to be investigated.
January 31st, 2010
6:35 am
It is very crucial to get traffic on a website so that it can be active. And after then, qualified visitors comes next step to get sell or shared the information.
January 31st, 2010
12:17 pm
I always think about how many buyers are actually visiting my site. 3. Disqualified Traffic – these are visitors who wouldn’t buy no matter what (maybe they arrived to your website by accident – they typed shingles and were looking for the medical condition not what you put on roofs, or maybe they don’t have the type of budget your product or service needs, etc.). All the best, Mike
February 1st, 2010
3:23 pm
I’m quite surprise that only 3% of the visitors are buyers. I guess that is some kind of average but it should vary for different online business. In this case publishers should focus on how to get Potential Buyers teased so they can return back by the time they are ready to buy. A wish list, Request More Information form or Newsletter Subscription should bring them back.
February 1st, 2010
4:20 pm
I am currently facing the issue of traffic not converting…good to read your tips, especially observing the big commerce sites, how they bring back the repeat customers..thanks
February 5th, 2010
8:01 am
On an average,, potential buyers would be 5%. I am guessing. Is there anyway we could improve this ?
February 6th, 2010
6:59 am
Thank for this article.บ้านมือสอง | หอพัก