Is Your Website Good at Generating Leads? Ask These 9 Questions

So many company leaders reach out to Square 2 and want to talk about their website. Once we review and audit the site, we usually find that it’s still an online brochure and not the lead-generating machine it should be.

After some discussions, we almost always uncover that what these people want is not a new website but rather a website that drives more leads, sales opportunities and new customers.

So, what’s missing from these websites? These nine questions will uncover how good your website is at generating leads. The answers to these questions are 100% data-driven – an approach you want to take to your website assessment too.

1. Does Your Website Get More Visitors Month Over Month?

Your site can’t generate leads if no one is visiting it. Your site must be the focal point of all your marketing. Everything should be driving people back to your website.

You need to know how many people come to your site every month. Visitors, unique visitors, sessions and unique sessions – all these metrics represent solid measures of how many people are coming to your site.

I prefer sessions or visitors because I don’t really care if people are coming back multiple times. Honestly, I feel like that shows the site has value, as people are returning to look for additional information.

Once your site is converting between 2% and 4% of total visitors, your goal is to drive as many people as possible to the site. Knowing this number now is going to help you baseline current performance.

2. Do You Know Where Exactly Those Visitors Are Coming From?

Visitors can come from several sources, including:

• Organic searches
• Organic social
• Direct searches for your specific URL
• Email marketing campaigns
• Paid advertising like search or social
• Referring sites where you have links or content posted

Knowing this is critical to understand how good your site is at driving visitors, where you need to improve performance and which sources are already driving strong traffic.

One of the secrets to good visitor traffic is activating ALL these sources and making sure they’re all moving up to the right month after month.

3. What Is Your Site-Wide Conversion Rate?

Now that you know how many people are coming to your site and where they’re coming from, the true measure of how good your site is at generating leads is the site-wide conversion rate.

Research shows that the average site-wide conversion rate across all industries is around 2.9%.

While results vary by company, industry and effort, if your site is under this benchmark, you likely have room for improvement. When most companies start working with Square 2, they have a site-wide conversion rate below 1%.

To help you navigate this data, understand that landing pages – pages specifically for lead generation – reportedly generate on average an 11.9% conversion rate. But based on our experience, you should expect a conversion rate above 25% for these pages.

4. What Are Your Most-Visited Pages?

To transform a website from an online brochure into a lead-generating machine, you need to know which pages are getting the most visitors. This is where you start deploying conversion and lead generation assets.

If pages with lots of visitors have low conversion rates, that’s where you’ll start your upgrade work.

5. What Pages Are Driving the Highest Conversion Rates?

Now that you know which pages are getting the most visitors, look at which pages are doing the best job at converting those visitors into leads.

This is going to uncover a couple of important insights. First, which content do those pages offer? This signals what your prospects find most valuable.

Next, what do these pages look like? How many fields are on the form? How long is the page? What headline and visuals are you using? Is there a testimonial on the page?

These insights will provide ideas to help improve other pages and drive more leads from the site over time.

6. What CTAs Are Driving the Highest Conversion Rates?

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are the buttons you use on the site to encourage people to click and convert from an anonymous visitor into a new lead. These can be graphic and visual or simple buttons with text.

CTAs usually convert between 1% and 3% of their impressions.

You should know how your CTAs are performing. Here’s an article from HubSpot that highlights CTA upgrade ideas and the quantitative improvement each one delivered.

This information allows you to create A/B tests for your CTAs and experiment with design and copy changes, page placement and personalization.

The better your team gets at CTA deployment, the more leads your website is going to generate.

7. Are You Getting More Leads Month Over Month?

Now we’re going to get down to it. Your site has to generate leads, so you’ll need to start tracking exactly how many leads your site generates today and track this month by month.

When you start, just work to get more leads each month. Before you know it, you’ll be getting a decent amount. If you keep applying the month-over-month approach, you’ll soon achieve the lead generation machine you’re seeking.

8. What Sources, Pages and Offers Are Those Leads Coming From?

Once you’re moving up and to the right with website-generated leads, the data will start to help you uncover insights as to what sources those leads are coming from.

We talked about these sources early in this article – organic search, organic social, email, referring sites, paid search, paid social and direct. When you know which sources are producing the most leads, you can double down on the most successful channels and work on improving the others.

Then you’ll start looking at the pages and the offers that produce the most leads. Apply the same thinking – double down on the pages and CTAs that are doing well, but also work to improve the performance of the pages and offers that are lagging.

9. What Percentage of Those Leads Is Turning Into Sales Opportunities and New Customers?

Finally, leads have to turn into sales opportunities and eventually new customers. You’ll want to track these too, but you’ll need help from the sales team.

Once you generate the lead and the prospect wants to talk with sales, it’s up to sales to qualify the opportunity. They’ll have to note it in the CRM or, by moving it from one stage to the other, the CRM can automatically capture the conversion rate and lead quality data.

The same motion will be needed when sales opportunities move to a closed new customer. Where did that new customer come from, what marketing did they interact with and how do you want to attribute that revenue back to your marketing effort?

This is advanced analytics, but it’s critical to realize exactly how marketing is producing new business revenue for the company.

If you can answer these nine questions about your website, you’ll have a clear picture of how good the site is at generating leads. If you can’t answer these questions, your homework is to get them. You might have to add some analytics to your website to get these answers, but regardless, they are critical to taking your marketing and your lead generation to the next level.