Everybody Optimizes for the 2 Percent Who Buy. I Work on the Other 98.
Most companies measure their website by the people who bought, filled in a lead form, or handed over an email. That is one or two visitors out of a hundred. The other 98 leave without a trace, and almost nobody has a plan for them.
How most companies count
Open any dashboard and you will find the same three numbers: how many people bought, how many filled in the lead form, how many gave an email with marketing consent. Add them up and a healthy site lands somewhere around one to two percent of visitors. Sometimes a little higher. That number gets reported, compared, and optimized, and the other 98 percent get filed under "traffic."
Here is the thing about those 98. You paid for most of them. They came from an ad, a search, a referral, a post. They were interested enough to click. And then the site gave them exactly one thing to do, which was the biggest possible commitment, and they were not ready for it. So they left, and the site treated that as normal.
What the 98 percent are
They are not lost. They are early. Someone comparing three plumbers on a phone at a red light. A buyer checking whether you ship to Ohio. An owner who read your pricing page and needs to talk to a partner first. A shopper who liked the belt but not the price today. None of them is a "no." All of them are a "not yet," and a "not yet" with nothing to do next becomes a "never" by default.
The ladder
My approach is to give those visitors a set of smaller actions, each fast and each a little more committed than the last, so a person who is not ready to buy still has something worth doing. In rough order:
Every rung is cheap to build. Most are settings, copy, and layout rather than a rebuild. And every rung produces something you can measure, so "the site is not converting" stops being one number and becomes a list of specific places where people stall.
Bringing them back
The other half of the approach is what happens after they leave. A visitor who climbed even one rung can be brought back with paid media that speaks to where they stopped: the product they saved, the guide they half read, the calendar they opened and closed. That is retargeting, and it is the most efficient ad spend a small company has, because it only goes to people who already showed up once. Done properly, it also respects the consent and disclosures your own privacy policy promises, which is not optional and not hard.
Put the two halves together and the math changes. You are no longer trying to move a two percent number by a fraction of a point. You are working the 98 percent, a few rungs at a time, and the buying number moves because the rungs under it filled up.
Where this applies
Across the board. Online stores, where the rungs are price, shipping, save, restock, buy. Service businesses, where they are service area, guide, quote, booked call. B2B companies, where a buyer comparing three vendors needs a reason to come back before the meeting. The steps differ. The idea does not.
Fair questions about this
Is this just retargeting with extra steps?
No. Retargeting is the second half. The first half is giving visitors something to do on the site before they leave, so there is something specific to retarget them about. Retargeting a visitor who bounced from your homepage in four seconds is expensive. Retargeting one who used your calculator is not.
What is a good website conversion rate?
For the buy, book, or lead-form number, most small and mid-sized companies sit between one and three percent, and it varies by industry, traffic source, and price point. I would rather you measured seven numbers, one per rung, than chased a benchmark for one.
Does this work for a service business or a B2B company?
Yes, and often better, because the sale is a conversation rather than a cart. The rungs become service area, guide, quote request, booked call. A B2B buyer comparing vendors almost never converts on the first visit, so the ladder is the difference between a second visit and none.
How long before it shows up in the numbers?
The rungs themselves take weeks, not months, because most are settings, copy, and layout. The retargeting half needs enough visitors to have climbed a rung before it has anyone to talk to, so the full picture usually takes a couple of months to read properly.
Want to know where your 98 percent stall?
That is what the free consultation is for. Bring your analytics, or do not; I will tell you what I would look at first.