Why Isn’t All My Traffic Converting?

A common challenge we often hear from brands is that they seem to acquiring lots of traffic to their website and to product pages but are struggling to convert any of that surplus traffic and acquire new customers. 

Now there can be a lot of different reasons for this happening, some more serious than others. So let’s have a look at what might be causing this challenge and what can be done to try and overcome the obstacle. 

Sending traffic to generic landing/product pages. 

Consumers are still expecting a more and more personalised and carefully curated shopping experience so ensuring that your landing pages are tailored to campaigns, ad types and audiences is key. 

If you’ve read, listened, or watched any of our content on Storytelling, you’ll know we are big ambassadors for the majority of your ad activity to be centred around your brand story and not necessarily on product. So, if your audience has been exposed to a specific storytelling campaign, with a certain style and messaging and then clicks a CTA to be taken directly to a product description page, the journey becomes disjointed and goes from curiosity and discovery to a clear sales message. 

Landing pages should be tailored to your ad. If the audience has clicked from an upper funnel ad your landing page should contain more details on your brand story, drive your chosen emotion and have a gentle sprinkling of product information. Only your bottom of funnel sales ads should direct through to a product description style landing page. 

Attracting the wrong type of traffic. 

Another reason could be that you’re just attracting the wrong audience. Knowing your audience could be one of the single most important aspects of setting up your campaigns. Without knowing who you should be targeting, how will you know if they will be interested in your product or will relate to your messaging? 

For luxury products, a “spray and pray” approach to targeting could mean that you are serving ads to an audience who will unfortunately never be able to buy your products. Serving them and ad and sending them to your site may well be wasted spend. 

You can identify your ideal audience by looking at demographic data in GA4 (we would recommend setting up 1st party data tracking in order to see the full picture of your website traffic) and also identifying your most recent, frequent and highest spending customers in your CRM system; whether that be Shopify or WooCommerce etc. This will allow you to build several audience personas or ideal customer profiles.  

They’re just discovering – leave them be. 

And sometimes, there is nothing sinister about traffic that doesn’t convert immediately. Consumers might just be browsing, learning more about your brand and making their own evaluations as to where they want to shop.

If you have recently launched performance branding or more upper funnel activities, you will be exposing your brand to new audiences who may never have heard of you before. If your ads are effective enough consumers will be curious to learn more about you, clicking through to your website. At this point we will assume that they are not ready to purchase therefore leaving your site without converting. 

But don’t worry about this. If you have your retargeting campaigns set up correctly, you will be nurturing these consumers and leading them all the way until they purchase from you. 

How can I identify the problem? 

You’ll need to test and learn. 

Take a look at your landing pages and ask yourself whether they are truly optimised. Test new landing pages and monitor performance. 

Review your targeting and make sure you are using as much 1st party data as possible to fuel any algorithm-driven campaigns. Look at your CRM and analytics platforms and update any audience personas.

Be patient. If you’ve done the above steps and are still noticing non-converting traffic, think about any recently launched campaigns and whether that could be affecting traffic levels. It may just be a case that the newly acquired traffic isn’t quite ready to buy yet but they will in the future. An attribution tool could help you see this in the long term.