No website in the world has a 100% conversion rate. Not even yours, no matter how hard you CRO.
Who are these heartless non-converting visitors, and why don’t they convert?
Some are bots. Google Analytics will filter out known bots, so hopefully you’ve checked that box. But the unknown bots? They go where they like 🤖😎
Some have landed on the site by accident. Clicked the wrong link, or misunderstood your offering. They’ll be gone before you know it. No chance to convert.
Some are competitors, come to steal your secrets. (3 weeks from now they’ll be testing an interstitial signup form, just like yours.)
Some are existing customers looking for a support article or product specifications. (Technically they do convert, if you consider “successfully finding support information” to be a conversion event 🏆)
Some are you, or your team, doing QA or maintenance. You can (and should) filter out internal IP addresses, and/or use the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on to keep yourself out of reports. But sometimes you work from a coffee shop, or use another machine, or another browser.
Some are in the market for what you’re selling, but don’t have the budget. (If your copy really sizzles, maybe some of this group will go into debt for you. But people who came expecting a price with fewer zeroes are just gonna close the tab in disappointment.)
Finally, plenty of these non-converting visitors are people who don’t need your product and don’t want it.
They might have thought they did, but they’ve found out otherwise. Probably your website played a significant part in this decision.
It doesn’t mean your website is bad, or that you should feel bad.
You can’t convert all the visitors to your site, any more than you can marry and have babies with all the boys in the world.
These non-converting visitors are part of life, part of your statistics, and they’ll always be there.
Your CRO efforts are powerless against them, and it’s fine.
If you missed it, yesterday we talked about visitors who will convert no matter what. Tomorrow we’ll look at the third type of website visitors - the ones you can actually do something about.