The monthly report arrives. Traffic is up 22%, bounce rate is down, you are ranking for eleven new keywords. You read it, you nod, and you still have no idea whether the website is making you any money.
The report is not lying to you. It is answering a question you never asked.
- Sessions up 22% on last month.
- Bounce rate improved to 48%.
- You now rank fourth for three new terms.
- 12,000 impressions in search.
- How many people asked to work with us?
- What did each of those enquiries cost?
- How many of them became customers?
- Did we make more than we spent?
Both columns are real data. Only one of them is in dollars. Here are the five numbers that put your website in the same language as the rest of your business.
1. Enquiries a month
Every call, form, email, quote request and direct message that came in because someone found you. One number, counted the same way every month.
This is the top line, and traffic is only ever a guess at it. A site that brings 400 visitors and 20 enquiries is beating a site that brings 4,000 and gets 12, and no traffic chart will ever tell you that.
The hard part is the phone. Web forms count themselves; calls do not. Adding "how did you hear about us?" to the start of a call, and writing the answer down, is the cheapest piece of business intelligence you will ever buy.
2. Your enquiry rate
Of every 100 people who land on your site, how many get in touch. Enquiries divided by visitors. It is the one number that separates two problems people constantly confuse: not enough people arriving, and the wrong thing happening to the people who do.
- All industries, average
- 2.35%
- B2B websites, median
- 2.9%
- Professional and legal services
- up to 7.4%
- Business software
- around 1.1%
- Online shops, clothing
- 2% to 3%
- Online shops, luxury and jewellery
- 0.8% to 1.2%
Medians across thousands of sites, so read them as a sanity check rather than a target. If you are a trade quoting local jobs and you are sitting at 0.4%, something on the page is stopping people. If you sell $40,000 software and you are at 1%, you are fine.
Most owners have never calculated this and are shocked by it. An enquiry rate of 2% means 98 out of every 100 people you paid to attract looked at your business and left without a word.
3. What an enquiry costs you
Everything you spent on being found this month, divided by the enquiries it produced. The ad budget, the agency retainer, the SEO work, the hours your own team spent on it. All of it, over the number of people who put their hand up.
This is the number that turns arguments into arithmetic. "Is the agency worth it" is a matter of opinion. "An enquiry cost us $37 in March and $110 in June" is not.
4. How many enquiries become customers
Out of every ten people who get in touch, how many end up paying you. This number is not in Google Analytics and it never will be. It lives in your invoices, your inbox and your head.
It also varies more than anything else on this list. A plumber quoting local jobs might close one in three. A long business sale with a procurement process behind it converts fewer than four leads in every hundred all the way to a signature. Somebody else’s benchmark is worthless here. Yours is the only one that counts, and you can work it out in an afternoon with twelve months of invoices.
5. What a customer is worth
Not what the first job was worth. What the whole relationship is worth. This is the number people underestimate most, and underestimating it is why so many businesses decide marketing "does not work" while quietly turning away profitable spend.
- The first job
- $600
- They come back twice a year
- $1,200 a year
- They stay four years
- $4,800
- They refer one person like them
- $9,600
If you set your marketing budget against the $600, you have been valuing your customers at one sixteenth of what they are actually worth, and turning down every opportunity that costs more than a few hundred dollars to win.
The sum the five numbers add up to
Numbers four and five multiply together into the figure that governs everything: what one enquiry is worth to you. Close three in ten, at $1,800 a customer, and every single enquiry is worth $540 before you have spoken to anybody. Set that against number three, what an enquiry costs, and you have your answer.
- Both spend a month
- $1,500
- Both get
- 25 enquiries at $60 each
- A: closes 3 in 10, customer worth $1,800
- $540 an enquiry
- B: closes 1 in 10, customer worth $300
- $30 an enquiry
Business A gets nine dollars back for every one it spends and should be spending far more. Business B is losing money on every enquiry it buys. Same website, same traffic, same invoice from the same agency. The website was never the variable.
Put your own five in and see where you land.
Five numbers you already have. Drag them to match your business and the three that actually decide things work themselves out below.
Below the 2.35% all-industry average (the marker). Of every 100 people who land on your site, 1 get in touch and the rest leave without you ever knowing they were there.
People arrive and leave without asking
You are paying to bring people to the site and most of them are going away again. That is a website problem rather than a traffic one, and it is usually an unclear offer, a slow page, or a contact form that asks for too much. It is also the cheapest thing on this list to fix, because the audience is already there.
Rough by design: it assumes every enquiry is worth the same and that your spend is the whole marketing cost. It is still closer to the truth than a traffic chart, because every number in it is denominated in money.
Reading the result: which problem you actually have
The value of these numbers is not the numbers. It is that they point at one thing to fix instead of five.
- Few visitors, healthy enquiry rate
- A visibility problem
- Plenty of visitors, low enquiry rate
- A website problem
- Plenty of enquiries, few customers
- A fit or follow-up problem
- All three healthy, still not growing
- You are under-spending
Only the first of those is solved by more marketing, which is awkward, because more marketing is what almost everyone sells you.
The follow-up problem is the cheapest one on the list
It is also the most common, and it has nothing to do with your website. A study of 1,000 companies by RevenueHero found that 63.5% never responded to an enquiry at all. The ones that did took an average of more than 29 hours.
That matters because of who wins. Around 78% of business buyers purchase from whoever replies first, and MIT’s research found a lead contacted within five minutes is 21 times more likely to qualify than one contacted at the thirty minute mark. If your enquiries are going cold in an inbox overnight, no amount of design work will save them, and an automated first response fixes it in a week.
Why these are not in your report
Two honest reasons and one less honest one.
- Two of the five are genuinely not available to whoever writes your report. Close rate and customer value live in your business, not in any analytics tool, and nobody has ever sent them over.
- The other three are harder to make look good. Traffic goes up whenever you publish anything. Impressions go up when Google decides to show you more, whether or not a single person clicks. Rankings improve for terms nobody searches.
- And a report that says "an enquiry cost you $110 this month, up from $37" is a report that invites a difficult conversation. Traffic charts rarely do.
Getting your five, this month
- Count every enquiry for one month, from every source. A spreadsheet with a date and a name is enough.
- Ask each one how they found you, and write the answer down.
- Pull the last twelve months of enquiries and mark which became customers. That is your close rate.
- Add up what those customers have paid you, including repeat work. Divide by the number of customers. That is what one is worth.
- Add up everything you spent on being found over the same period, and do the two divisions.
It takes an afternoon and it will change what you spend money on for the next three years.
We run websites, SEO, GEO and ads against these five numbers rather than against a dashboard, because they are the only ones that survive contact with a P&L. If you want yours worked out properly, that is a short first conversation.
