How many website visitors does it take to make a sale?

What an interesting question, because I’ll bet you a Benjamin that it’s going to be different for every business.

Furthermore, I’ll bet you a Grant that most business and marketing execs don’t know the answer.

Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be nice to know just how much traffic you’d need to drive to your website in order to reach your monthly sales goals?

If you’re a fan of ASTRALCOM, you’ll know by now that we have a very scientific approach. We use and even create heuristics to ensure our efforts deliver lift from a specific strategy, or a variety of tactics across multiple channels. This helps our clients reach their growth objectives.

There are certain processes and/or elements which we’ve found to be critical to creating successful outcomes. Sometimes, they can even be made into “formulae” to represent the process, as with our “The Mathemagical Customer Conversion Formula.”

It’s no different here. In fact, this heuristic is less subjective and is largely based on historical website performance data. If you’re running Google Analytics and have Goal Funnels established – or some way to measure conversions – you’re all set.

Your Business Here

Let’s say, for example, that you sell carbon fiber racing boats at $200,000 per boat.

Your average monthly website traffic is 5,000 and your conversions (sales inquiries) for this period are 110.

Your average monthly sales have been 7 boats per month. This next quarter, your goal is to sell 5 more boats per month.

How much more traffic is required to sell 5 more boats?

To answer that, we’ll first need to ask some relevant questions:

1. How many visitors does it take to make a conversion?
2. How many conversions does it take to make a sale?

The answers are within this heuristic:

Traffic / Conversions = # of Visits needed to make a Conversion

Visits / Sales = # of Conversions needed to make a Sale

Let’s do some math to clearly demonstrate this.

You’ve looked at your last 12 months of website analytics and sales information. You’ve crunched the numbers down to monthly averages to make it easier to work with.You’ve observed that your average monthly website traffic totals 5,000 visits and your average monthly conversions total 110. Doing the math, this means that it takes 45.4 website visitors to create one conversion.

Similarly, if 110 conversions resulted in seven sales, that means that it takes 15.7 conversions to make one sale.

Therefore, to sell five more boats, we’d need to create 78.5 more conversions; which would require 3,563.9 more new visitors each month.

In other words, to increase sales by 5 more boats each month, we’d need to increase targeted traffic to the website by 71.2%.

Make sense?

If not, post a reply, or contact us, and we’ll be happy to help you figure out just how much traffic you need to reach your sales goals.