An agency's analytics show thousands of visits a month. The blog is popular. The homepage gets plenty of views. But when the founder looks at last quarter's new clients, most came from referrals, and the website produced only a handful of real briefs. Which pages actually helped? Nobody knows.
Many agencies measure traffic because it is easy. Measuring which pages produce real enquiries is harder, but far more useful.
Why traffic misleads
A page can attract lots of visitors who will never hire an agency, such as students, job seekers and people looking for free advice. Another page might get a fraction of the traffic but bring in serious prospects. We covered the gap in agency websites get traffic but few real briefs.
The checklist
1. Record where every enquiry starts. Whenever an enquiry comes in, note the page it started on. A website assistant does this naturally because each conversation happens on a specific page. SpideyChat for agencies keeps each conversation and captured lead, so you can review where briefs began.
2. Mark which enquiries became real briefs. Not every enquiry is a good one. Go back each month and mark which became calls, proposals and clients. This is the step most agencies skip.
3. Compare pages over time. After a few months, patterns appear. Perhaps one service page produces most of the good briefs. Perhaps a particular case study brings in prospects from a sector you want to grow in.
4. Look at the questions asked on each page. The questions visitors ask show what each page fails to explain. If people on your branding page keep asking about timelines, add a timeline section. Portfolio pages often reveal gaps, as covered in portfolio pages that should be answering questions.
5. Check your analytics for the journey. Use your website analytics tool to see which pages visitors viewed before enquiring. A prospect might start on a blog post, visit a case study and enquire from the contact page. The first and last pages both matter.
6. Separate noise from leads. Job applications, supplier pitches and link requests should not count as enquiries. Sorting them out gives a truer picture.
7. Review quarterly and act. Improve the pages that nearly work, and give more prominence to those that do.
What to do with the results
Pages that produce good briefs deserve more attention: better case studies, clearer calls to action, links from other pages. Pages with high traffic and no enquiries may need a clearer path to your services, or may simply be serving a different audience.
Property businesses do the same kind of analysis for listings, as described in measuring which listings generate real enquiries. The idea transfers directly.
Turning questions into content
Every question a visitor asks is a small piece of research. Collect them, group them and turn the common ones into page content. Over time the site answers more on its own, and the conversations that do happen are more serious. More on generating leads this way is in how to generate more leads with a website chatbot.
Setting it up
Install the assistant on the pages you want to measure, and train it on your site so it answers accurately. The guides to installing the widget and training your bot cover the steps.
A few months of honest measurement often changes where an agency spends its content effort.