Why do people visit my website but not enquire

Where the visitors go

People visit your website, some of them enquire, and a few buy. Where the rest go is anyone's guess. So the usual response is to get more people through the door: a bit of advertising, a few more posts, maybe an SEO project. That works about as well as pouring water into a bucket you have never looked at. If the bucket has a hole, more water just leaves faster.

This article shows you how to find the hole. You can do it with free tools and one sitting at your desk, and you do not need to be technical.

What we are actually mapping

A conversion funnel is the path a visitor takes from first arriving on your site to becoming an enquiry or a customer, with some people dropping away at every step. A "leak" is a step where an unusually large share of them drop away. Your job is to find the biggest one and work out why it happens.

The method, step by step

I will use a worked example as we go. The business below is invented for illustration, as are its numbers. They are there to show the arithmetic and are not real data.

Step 1: Write down the path, one step per line

Start with a blank page and list every step between "someone arrives" and "someone pays you". Be honest about the steps that happen off the website too. For a mobile mechanic (our example, a made-up one-person business called Coastline Mobile Mechanics), the path looks like this:

1. Arrives on the site (from Google, Facebook or a link)
2. Views a service page
3. Reaches the contact page
4. Starts the enquiry form (or taps the phone number)
5. Sends the enquiry
6. Gets a reply
7. Gets a quote
8. Books the job

Notice that steps 6 to 8 happen in the inbox and on the phone. Many people stop their map at the form, and that is a mistake I will come back to.

Step 2: Put a real number beside each step

Pick a fixed window, such as the last 30 days, and count how many people reached each step. Where the numbers come from:

• Steps 1 to 3: Google Analytics (a free tool that counts visits and which pages people view). Look at the pages report for your service and contact pages.
• Steps 4 and 5: Your form tool or website platform usually shows submissions. For form starts and phone taps, you may need to set up "events" (small tracking markers) in Google Analytics. If that sounds like too much, skip the starts and count only submissions for now.
• Steps 6 to 8: Count them by hand from your inbox, phone log or job book.

Coastline's sheet, with invented figures, comes out like this:

Step 3: Work out what share survives each step

Divide each number by the one above it. Here, 400 of 1,000 view a service page (40 per cent). 150 of 400 reach the contact page (about 38 per cent). 40 of 150 start the form (about 27 per cent). 12 of 40 send it (30 per cent). Then the later steps hold up reasonably.

The question to ask is where the drop is steepest among people who clearly wanted something. Someone who reached the contact page is close to the finish line. Losing roughly three quarters of them there is more worrying than losing people on the home page, many of whom were never going to book a mechanic. So the contact page to form start is the suspect, with the form itself a close second.

Step 4: Look at what people actually do

Numbers tell you where the leak is. They do not tell you why. For the why, you need to see behaviour. Three cheap ways:

• Use the site on your phone, cold. Pretend you have a flat battery and need a mechanic today. Try to enquire. Most small business sites are tested on a laptop and used on a phone.
• Watch session recordings. Microsoft Clarity is a free tool that records anonymised visits so you can watch where people scroll, tap and leave. Watch ten or so visits to your contact page.
• Ask recent enquirers. Send a two-line message to your last few customers: "What nearly stopped you from getting in touch?" Real answers beat guesses.

In our example, imagine the recordings show people landing on the contact page, scrolling the form (which asks for registration, make, model, year, kilometres and a fault description), and leaving. A couple tap the phone number, which is plain text and does nothing on a phone. Nobody can see whether the mechanic even services their suburb.

Step 5: Write one suspected cause per leak

Finish with a sentence in this shape: "People are dropping at [step] because [reason], and I will know I am right if [change] moves the number." For Coastline: "People drop at the contact page because the form asks for too much too early and the phone number cannot be tapped. If I cut the form to name, suburb, phone and a one-line problem, and make the number tappable, more of the 150 should start it."

What good looks like versus what most people produce

A good result is a single page. It has the steps in order, a real count against each, the share that survives each step, one circled leak, the evidence for why (a recording, a customer comment, your own phone test), and one proposed change with the number you will watch.

What most people produce is a vague list: "improve the homepage, add testimonials, post more, update the photos, maybe run ads." Nothing on it has a number against it, nothing is ranked, and nothing says what would count as success. It feels productive and changes nothing, because it never points at one place.

Three mistakes that make the exercise useless

1. Looking at one overall percentage

"Two per cent of visitors enquire" is a single number that hides everything. It cannot tell you whether the problem is the page, the form or the follow-up. The value comes from the step-by-step breakdown, so keep it.

2. Mixing all your traffic together

Someone who searched "mobile mechanic near me" and someone who clicked a general Facebook post behave very differently. If you can, split your numbers by source in Google Analytics and look at your best source on its own. Also exclude your own visits and any obvious junk traffic, or you will be measuring yourself.

3. Stopping at the form

Many leaks sit after the enquiry. Slow replies, a quote that takes three days, or a price that surprises people can lose enquiries you worked hard for. If your map ends at "form sent", you will tidy a form while the real loss happens in your inbox.

A fourth trap is worth a mention: changing five things at once. If you rewrite the form, the headline, the photos and the pricing in the same week, you will never know which one helped or hurt.

What to do with it once it is written

Most articles stop at the diagnosis. The map only pays off if you act on it in a disciplined way.

1. Pick one leak and one change. Take the circled step and make the single change you wrote down. Resist the urge to fix the rest while you are in there.
2. Write the "before" number and a review date. Record the current figure for that step. Set a review date in your calendar. Rather than a fixed number of days, wait until enough people have passed through the step for the figure to mean something. If only a handful of people reach it, a swing from 4 to 6 is noise.
3. Compare, then decide. If the number improved, keep the change and move to the next biggest leak. If it did not, undo it or try a different cause. Either result teaches you something, which is more than adding traffic would have.
4. Keep a simple log. One line per change: date, what you changed, the before and after figures. In six months this becomes a record of what works for your customers specifically.
5. Repeat the map every month or two. Fixing one leak often shifts the biggest drop to another step. That is normal, and it is the process working.
6. Decide about traffic last. Once your steps are holding up and the leaks are small, more visitors will actually pay off. Doing it in that order means you are filling a bucket that holds water.

Nothing here guarantees a particular result, because every site and audience differs. What it does give you is a clear reason behind each change you make, in place of a hunch.

Doing this properly takes an afternoon. If you would rather have it done for you, a Conversion Funnel Map built from your own answers is $99.