Is Your Manufacturing Website Getting the Right Traffic?

semi trucks highway
January 19, 2017

Nobody’s website is perfect, and you’ll never get optimal performance out of it. Your bounce rate will never be 0% and you’ll never rank in the top position on Google for all of your keywords. And that’s okay. But it’s a good idea to know how your manufacturing website stacks up compared to others in your industry, so you can identify performance issues that need to be addressed.

One of the first things we do with a new manufacturing client is check their website performance so we can develop a smart strategy that addresses their greatest needs first. 

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Our clients ask us all the time where they should be getting their website traffic from. They want to know how much should come from social, email, and organic traffic—and where they can improve.

While the answers are specific for each business and their target personas, HubSpot just released some great benchmark data on the website traffic that manufacturing organizations (and others) are generating. You can use this as a terrific starting point to see how your website is performing.

Your source data is an important website benchmarking metric, because it reveals who your visitors are. For example, if the bulk of your visitors are coming from direct traffic, that’s an indication that you aren’t getting discovered by people who haven’t already heard of you–which is an issue.

HubSpot Research exported over a year’s worth of sources data from HubSpot customers and created website visit benchmarks across business type, employee size, region, and industry. Their report shows the proportion of total visits and average visits from each traffic source, from January 2014 through May 2015.

Here are the most relevant charts for manufacturers, with some details on what they mean for you. Want the full report? You can check out all the data at HubSpot Research.

Traffic Source Benchmarking for Manufacturing Websites

B2B Visitors

Graph: Proportion of visits from each source by company type

 

Table: Proportion of visits from each source by company type

B2B and B2C companies have nearly identical profiles when it comes to proportions of visits from various sources. By far, the greatest source of visits comes from organic and direct traffic (although you should note this bit of info about “direct” traffic). Referrals are also significant. The fact that email is such a low contributor suggests that companies across the board have some improvements to make in their email marketing campaigns.

Let’s take a look at the sources profile for manufacturers, specifically.

Proportion of Visits

Graph: Proportion of visits from each source by industry
Table: Proportion of visits from each source by industry

Here’s how it breaks down across B2B industries. Notice that the manufacturing industry gets the most ROI on organic and direct traffic–basically, from Google and from going directly to the site. Like most industries (except marketing), manufacturing companies are underperforming with email and social traffic. That means there may be an opportunity you could take advantage of, which other manufacturers are missing out on.

Average Monthly Website Visits

Here’s the average sources of visits per month for manufacturing companies. I like this chart because not only can you see how different sources fluctuate at peak and low business seasons, but you can benchmark actual visits per site with your own numbers.

What Does Your Website Need Most?

How do your numbers compare to these? Every manufacturing company is different, but this gives you a starting point to consider where you need to invest more attention when it comes to drawing more eyeballs to your website.

You can go to the full report to see detailed charts showing numbers of visitors by company size and region.

…But Maybe You Shouldn’t Attract More Visitors

Even if your numbers are lower than the manufacturing industry standard, you might not need to focus on getting more traffic to your site–at least, not right away. Check the shape of your sales funnel first, and figure out what stage of the funnel needs the most work. You might discover that fixing your leads problem ends up giving you more visitors too!

Need help figuring out where to go from here? Our services packages are designed to give you one-on-one help with specific marketing needs. Check them out!

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