What to Do When Your Website or Sales Page Doesn’t Perform as Expected

You launched your website with high hopes. Maybe it was a brand-new site, or you spent weeks on a redesign, expecting the traffic to roll in and the sales to soar. But instead, it’s crickets. Sound familiar? If your website isn’t performing as expected, you’re not alone. Every entrepreneur faces setbacks, and today, we’re going to talk about how to turn those challenges into opportunities for growth.


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Chapters

• 0:49 Improving Website Performance for E-Commerce
• 6:13 Analyzing Website Performance Metrics and Fixes
• 17:04 Support and Improvement for E-Commerce

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:50

Sometimes, when you launch a web page, a sales page or a landing page, you feel like you're getting crickets and it's not doing what you wanted to do and it's not performing to what you expected. I know it's happened to all of us, it happens to our clients, it's happened to us personally as well. It's something very normal, very familiar to have happen, and most entrepreneurs will face this at some point in time in their online business. Today, we're going to be talking about how to turn those challenges in those field web launches whether it's a single page or a whole website into opportunities for growth and how we can make them better and more successful. Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, kei Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine month old my main goal to help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that and web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the e-commerce made easy podcast.

Carrie Saunders: 2:04

Today we're talking about what happens when your website or your sales page or your landing page doesn't perform as you expected when you launch it, whether your traffic is slower to it or your bounce rate is really high, which means, basically, somebody lands on the page and then immediately leaves and does nothing else, or your conversions aren't just quite what you wanted them to be. We're going to be talking about how to identify those and how to fix them as well. So let's first start off by talking about why they happen. Why do these setbacks happen? When we're building something new for our website and again I want to normalize this for us, it's very normal to have happen. Don't feel like a failure. It's just part of the process where you need to launch something, check it, revise it and then launch it again. So again, I want to make sure this is normal. I want this to be more normalized because we don't talk about our failures a lot of times when we're in business.

Carrie Saunders: 3:02

So one of the reasons it can happen the setback can happen is you don't have clear goals. So if your website or your page doesn't have a clear purpose, it's hard to measure the success of that website or page and make improvements. So I want to make sure that you step back and look at it and say have I created a clear goal for this? Again, whether it's a website or a specific page like a landing page or a sales page, do you have a clear goal for this? This is something we go over in our converting website course. A lot is, and I stress, and people like have the light bulb moment of oh wow, I hadn't really thought about what the goals are of my website or this particular page. Many times with the sales page, we do have a goal, but sometimes it's not. It's a little bit vague still and unclear. So we want to make sure that goal is very clear. Sometimes we have mismatched expectations. Sometimes what you think your audience wants isn't actually what they need. So if you think this might be the case, then I want you to go back and start asking questions of your audience. Try to figure out exactly what it is that they need, and maybe you've built something they actually do need, but the words you're using don't resonate with them and don't match the words they would use for what they need too. So take a look at that with fresh new eyes and see if you can see whether there might be some mismatch expectations for this landing page or website.

Carrie Saunders: 4:34

Another thing and we talk about this a lot on the podcast is just technical issues with your website. Is your website too slow? Do you have broken links? Does your website work well on mobile devices and tablets? We want to make sure that all these things are in line and clear and working well, because we don't want to create any sort of barrier or confusion or frustration with our website or landing page whenever we are putting our offer out there. So, if you haven't already, we have quite a few podcast episodes on how to do this and this is something we actually go through in our online courses, while the converting website and then misaligned messaging and we touched on this a little bit already.

Carrie Saunders: 5:16

But if your content doesn't resonate with your audience, they're unlikely to engage or convert on your website. So we want to do some digging. What words does your audience actually use? Go look out in Facebook groups or Reddit threads sometimes are even helpful. What are your people searching for talking about? What words do they use when they're speaking about their pain points or their problems and the things that they want to solve, and make sure you're using language just like that, and very similar, on your website. Of course it needs to sound like you, but we also need to be using those familiar words to them so that there isn't a familiarity breakdown in the words they're reading versus the ones that are in their head too. So those are some of the four things that you can look at when your website might be underperforming and why it might be underperforming. So we want to assess the situation.

Carrie Saunders: 6:13

So, as we're looking through these things, we want to figure out where do we think it's actually failing, and some ways we can do that is by looking at traffic metrics in something like Google Analytics. We can see how much volume is coming to the website or the page where it's coming from. Where do the customers go after they've entered into your website or the sales page? How are they finding your site? Are they staying for a very long time or are they leaving very quickly? Leaving on one page is considered a bounce. So if they land on one page and don't come, you know, don't click on anything else that's called a bounce. So that will tell you that either your messaging to get them to your website is wrong, or your messaging on your website is typically wrong because there's a disconnect there, or it could be there's something technically wrong with the page, whether it's too slow, it doesn't work on the device that they're using. That's another reason that you might have a bounce on that page, for example.

Carrie Saunders: 7:17

And then conversion rates. So we want to look at not only how many people are coming to your website, but how many people the action that you want whether it's buying something, signing up for your newsletter then that's an important metric to measure, and so you'll know you have a better performance if that ratio is better the next time around. So even if maybe next time around you get 200 visitors, you're going to want to get more than 20 visitors doing that action to see an improvement. The number of visitors have increased, sure, but the percentage of people still doing that action would be the same if it's 20. So we want to make sure that that's even getting better. So it's great that you got more traffic in that example, but we want to make sure that we're also converting at a much higher rate too.

Carrie Saunders: 8:19

And then we want to get some user feedback. So reach out to customers, talk to them. You probably have past customers. You might have people you're talking to in social media or on your newsletter. You can ask them for specific feedback and when you do that, make sure your questions are simple and clear and concise. We are all busy, as I'm sure you know, and the easier the question is to answer, the less effort on their part, the more likely they're going to answer it. And whenever you start to get their attention with an easy question, the more likely they will actually answer a more complicated question too. So really, kind of step them into giving you the feedback and first make it easy on them. I'm not saying we want to make it hard on them, obviously, but sometimes we do need a little bit more detailed explanation. But if you at least get that first easy question out, you can ask for more clarifying information if needed.

Carrie Saunders: 9:13

And then I want us to then prioritize site fixes Now. Don't feel like you have to do everything all at once. We want to pick the lowest hanging fruit that has the best bang for the buck. So if you are noticing that your website is too slow, then let's fix that. You can check that with some websites that we will link to, and the resources are several out there. Many of them are free and Google even provides one as well, and that's one of them I think is very important to always use, because Google is sending traffic to your website and we want to make sure we keep people happy, right. But there's other ones that are also a good way to check to just to get a varying information on how well your website's doing speed wise. So if you're finding that it's too slow, then we want to make sure we fix that, because that's an easy low hanging fruit, because people don't want to wait around for a website.

Carrie Saunders: 10:07

I know I don't when things are too slow, I'm too busy for that and I go on and do something else, and then if you feel like your messaging is off, then maybe you want to fix that. Next, let's say you have the amount of traffic you want. You feel like they're staying around long enough, they're not like bouncing because of some sort of technical issue with your website. Then let's fix your messaging, just change it a little bit. You don't want to change too many things at once, because then you won't be able to know what was the item that actually helped. And if you do change more than one thing at once. Maybe you did something that helps the website, maybe you did something else that harms it. So again, I reiterate that we want to make sure we do this as like an iterative process, where we're changing one thing at a time, unless there are some really blatantly obvious several low-hanging fruits. Then do several at once, like the pages being too slow. But definitely when it comes to messaging, I want to make sure that we're only doing a little bit at a time to make sure we are understanding if we're going in the right direction or not.

Carrie Saunders: 11:11

We also want to optimize for mobile, so make sure that you're testing with your mobile devices. Most website browsers like Firefox and Chrome have an emulator in it where you can actually pretend like you're on a mobile device on your computer. So then that makes it easier. Say, you are an Android person, you don't have iPhones around you. You can then test pretty well, accurately, with your website browser for iPhone devices too. So make sure you're utilizing tools like that iPhone devices too. So make sure you're utilizing tools like that. And then, if traffic is what's low? If you're not getting enough traffic to your website, then I want you to focus on some search engine optimization, and we actually have a free search engine optimization course that we'll link to it in the show notes In search engine optimization.

Carrie Saunders: 11:57

I want to make sure it's not scary for you, because it's actually not too hard now. Now it used to be a lot harder, a lot more technical to do that. In the modern world, with our modern software, search engine optimization is a lot easier. So that's one of the ways you can get more traffic in your website is by doing search engine optimization Well. Another way is obviously focusing on social media as well, but just keep in mind that search engine optimization is a long game and it's going to bring you long term benefits, where a social media post will bring you a short traffic in the short term and those posts don't last very long unless you're using something like Pinterest or YouTube or something that's more of a search engine versus like Facebook or Instagram. I feel like LinkedIn posts tend to stay around a little bit longer than like Facebook or Instagram, so make sure that you're putting your time and effort into something that's going to be long lasting as well too. So I just want to caution not to feel like you need to be posting on social all the time, because that's more of a short term fix than a long term fix too.

Carrie Saunders: 13:06

And then, when you're doing this, I want to make sure that we are testing it as you change things. And so make sure you're testing, like I said, one thing at a time if possible, unless there's absolutely a few things that you must do. Say, your mobile doesn't work well and your website's slow, I definitely fix those two things right away. But as far as like messaging and small tweaks, I want to make sure we're only doing a few at a time, or one or two at a time, so we can more narrow down exactly what is working whenever we're testing it. And then there are some software tools out there, like Hotjar and Crazy Egg etc. That you can see heat maps, and you can actually do this with a Chrome extension. Last I checked a Google Chrome extension to see where people are looking at and clicking through on your website, so you can use certain tools to kind of see where they're getting stuck to. There's lots of them out there. Many of them are paid, so that's really up to your budget and your discretion if you want to go down that route, but I want to make sure that you know that it's available out there.

Carrie Saunders: 14:11

And then make sure you're monitoring certain things. In Google Analytics, we want to be monitoring how many people are coming to the website in a specific time period. How many people are clicking on, say, your specific call to actions that you want and measure. You know the conversion rate for that. It's just the ratio of the two and I want to make sure that there's. If there's anything else you want to measure, we need to be making sure you're looking at that. Also, look at your bounce rates within Google analytics, too. That kind of gives you a healthy pulse on your website, because if your bounce rates are high, then there's something wrong. Generally it's technical. Usually it it's speed or mobile view. Sometimes it's messaging too, like we talked about earlier on the podcast.

Carrie Saunders: 14:55

But I want to make sure that you're also measuring these things too and don't feel too overwhelmed about it. Pick something that seems tangible to you and work on that. I had a quote the other day that I read and it was along the lines of quote the other day that I read, and it was. It was along the lines of where you're practicing at everything, and practicing makes us better. So why not look at what you're doing with your website as practice, and every time you do something with your website like this, you're going to get better at it, so don't be discouraged and you'll be able to get better at it, trust me.

Carrie Saunders: 15:29

And then we want to make sure we stay motivated during these setbacks, too, which is kind of where I'm leaning into now, because we want to focus on that progress and not perfection. Nothing is ever perfect, and I am saying this and shouting to the sky because I am a perfectionist myself and I have to tell myself this a lot, and I actually put something out this week that wasn't perfect, but it was done and I knew I could go back and revise it when needed. So just make sure you're keeping that in mind. Focus on progress, not perfection, and you can always learn from others. You know we have lots of blogs on our website too, as well as this podcast. And look at other competitors too. What are they doing? What do you think they're doing? Well, don't feel like you have to copycat them, because you want to be you and you and be unique as well, but we can learn about how these others are doing and you know, it might give us some really good ideas. It may even give us a really good new idea that we can do ourself.

Carrie Saunders: 16:29

And then also, if you feel overwhelmed, seek help when needed. We're always here to help you out. At BCS Engineering, we're always here to help you out or talk to a mentor or a coach or get in a mastermind. It's great to not be alone in the online business and entrepreneurship. These past year or so, I have found so many new business best friends and it really helps me stay focused and stay happy and healthy mentally in my work environment, which then will resonate and translate into my website as well.

Carrie Saunders: 17:05

So I want to make sure that you have a support group that can help you out as well. And if you get into any technical stickiness, you know you're always welcome to contact us or a trusted tech provider as well. All right, so that's all we have for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. I hope that was super helpful to you and I'd love to see some improvements that you made to your website. You're always welcome to email us at podcast at bcsengineeringcom with your before and afters or any case studies or anything that you're super proud of, and we would love to feature you on the podcast and please be sure to rate us wherever you're listening, if you haven't already and share this as a business friend if you feel like it would help them. We would be so grateful for that and we will see you next week.