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Are you having this problem?  You get lots of visits to your site, but no sales (not even clicks). Nobody seems to click on anything, or buy anything?

Someone mentioned recently that he was getting a lot of visits to every page of his site (!), but nobody was clicking, or buying anything.

He proudly showed off his AWStats (those are the stats that your web host will often include in your hosting package), showing over 1,000 monthly visits to his brand-new site, from all over the world. Great, huh?

Not so fast.

I’m getting visits, why no buyers? Why no clicks?

The problem?

The visits were robots. AWStats counts every time a robot, a spider, or other automatic web indexing tool browses your site as a visit. It’s, of course, important to have Google notice you. However, robots, and spiders don’t click (or buy anything either).

Get a truer picture of your stats

If you want a more accurate picture of your stats, there are better tools. Head over to Google and set up analytics for your site. It’s free. It will show you visits, sources, time on page, and much more.  You can even set up goals and conversions (for particular actions or pages you want people to visit (like sales page).  You’ll get a much more accurate picture of what real people are doing.

Once you’ve got stats set up, you can get a better idea of what’s going on. Look at which pages are getting traffic, then where it’s coming from, how long people stay on each page, and the bounce rate.

Is the bounce rate too high?

This could be because the information isn’t what your visitors really wanted.  I had a blog post that referenced Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone to illustrate a point about voice mail.  I kept getting visits for people looking for recordings to use for their answering machines. The traffic was high, but so was the bounce rate. My post didn’t answer my visitor’s question or fit their needs.

Traffic to the right pages

Are there specific pages you want people to read?  Products you offer, or an article about an important industry topic?  Monitor which pages draw traffic, and from where.  If all the traffic you’re getting is going to a silly post about mustaches, rather than your serious take on choosing the right app developer, you may need to adjust your marketing strategy.

Traffic from the right sources

Do search engines see your site?  Are they sending traffic?  Are your social media efforts paying off with traffic to your site? Are you visible in the right places/blogs/groups/sites with comments and articles?

Sales funnel failure

There are a number of reasons that your sales funnel can fail.  It could be that your “buy” button is hard to see. Or, maybe your sales page is difficult to read and your page design needs an overhaul.  Another possibility is that your sales page is leaking (too many distractions).  Or, it could be as simple as a broken link somewhere. Try it yourself.  Go through your sign up process or your sales process.  Or, if you’re too close to it, ask a friend to try.

Not ready to buy

There’s another possibility. You can do everything right, but still not get high sales because you’re attracting people who aren’t ready to buy.  Either they’re still in the research phase of the purchasing process or the problem they have isn’t urgent.  If they don’t need to fix it right now, they won’t buy  immediately.  You can help them along by pointing out additional resources for their problem, offering a free quick consultation, or adding a chat option so they can ask questions. This can help nudge people along in the sales process without being pushy.