3 Reasons Why Your Homepage Conversion Rates Are Likely Not Accurate

Whenever a company wants to get an idea of how well their online business is doing , they tend to start by looking at the number of visitors to the homepage. While this is a good way to gauge your initial numbers, there are a few different factors in why this does not necessarily make a good denominator for your conversion metrics, especially for companies past the start-up stage. I get the impetus behind it, and a lot of people use the analogy of people visiting your home page as being equivalent to people visiting your store front, but this connection is not apples to apples. Your homepage can serve several, competing purposes and that should be reflected in your data.

Further, tens of thousands of dollars (or more) are spent on marketing to get people to the page without necessarily thinking of the whole funnel. Marketing teams are typically asked to get more people to the homepage, but their messaging and tactics might be bringing in “bad traffic”, that is to say, users who will never convert and click on an ad that is unintentionally (or intentionally) misleading information. If your marketing team is only concerned with getting the homepage numbers up, you won’t attract the valuable traffic you are looking for. Here are a few other reasons why homepage traffic is not the best denominator for your conversion metric.