Is your website leaving money on the table?
Almost every business I talk to has the same plan for growth. More traffic.
More ads. More SEO. More social. More spend. I get it. Traffic is easy to measure and easy to buy.
But it keeps getting more expensive to buy. Google Ads costs went up in 87% of industries last year, according to WordStream’s benchmarks, and anyone running paid social will tell you a similar story.
So here’s the question I always want to ask. What happens once people actually arrive?
If your website isn’t turning the visitors you already have into customers or enquiries, more traffic doesn’t fix anything. It just means paying more to lose more people.
We’ve spent nearly 18 years at Bopgun helping businesses turn website visits into revenue, and I’ve seen the same thing more times than I can count. A great business. A good product. A team that cares. And a website quietly losing sales and enquiries every single day.
Not because anyone did a bad job. Because nobody was looking.
Websites tend to get treated as projects. You plan, you build, you launch, you move on. Meanwhile, the site has become the hardest-working salesperson you’ve got, and nobody has ever given it a review.
The frustrating part is that it’s rarely one big, expensive problem. It’s usually a handful of small ones.
A few examples we come across all the time. See if any sound familiar.
A shopper finds the perfect product, adds it to their basket and heads to checkout. Only then do they see the delivery charge, and they’re gone. It’s the single most common reason people give for abandoning a basket in Baymard Institute’s research, and across the sites they’ve studied, around seven in ten baskets are abandoned.
An online shop makes first-time buyers create an account before they can pay. It feels like a sensible way to build a customer list. Nearly one in five shoppers in the same research said that alone had made them give up.
A creative studio has a stunning portfolio and a steady stream of visitors, but the inbox is quiet. Look closer, and the only way to get in touch is a long form hidden on the contact page. People are impressed by the work, then leave without a next step.
A B2B firm sees visitors land on its services page and disappear. No testimonials, no client logos, nothing to say what happens after you get in touch. Visitors have no reason to trust them at exactly the moment they’re deciding.
None of these needs a new website. Most are things a team could fix in a week or two, if they knew to look.
The CRO Scorecard is our way of helping businesses look. It’s ten yes-or-no questions about your website, and it takes about 90 seconds.
There’s no sign-up, you don’t need to give us an email address to see your score, and we won’t chase you with sales calls. It works whether you sell products online or rely on your website for enquiries.
Here’s a simple way to think about it. Say your site gets 5,000 visitors a month and 1% of them buy or enquire. That’s 50.
You could double your ad spend to reach 10,000 visitors and get 100. Or you could fix what’s stopping people from converting, move from 1% to 2%, and get the same 100 from the traffic you already have.
The numbers are made up, but the principle isn’t. More traffic is something you pay for every month. A better-converting website keeps paying you back.
If you’re a B2C brand, this matters most in the run-up to Black Friday and Christmas, when you’ll see more visitors than at any other time of year, and advertising is at its most expensive. Fixing the quick wins before the traffic arrives makes every pound of that budget work harder.
We’re proud to be part of the Bristol Creative Industries community, and we’d love members to give the scorecard a go. It’s built for exactly the kind of businesses that make up BCI: studios, agencies, makers and independent brands who rely on their website but don’t have a conversion specialist on the team.
If you design or build websites for clients, it’s also a handy way to start a conversation about how a site performs after launch.
BCI members can book a free 20-minute call with us to talk through their results. Just mention BCI when you get in touch.
Worst case, you confirm you’re doing well. Best case, you find the money you’ve been leaving on the table.
And if you do, I’d genuinely love to hear what you score.
David
Bopgun is Bristol's conversion rate optimisation agency. We find out why your website visitors aren't converting, then fix it. Backed by seventeen years of experience with some of the UK's best-known brands.
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