Website Numbers for Small Businesses: Enquiries, Conversion and Cost per Lead

Most small businesses judge their website by how it looks. A far better test is what it produces. A handful of simple figures will tell you whether your website is bringing in work, where enquiries are being lost and what each new customer is really costing you.

The four numbers that matter

• Visitors: how many people reach the site each month, and where they come from
• Enquiries: calls, forms and messages received from the website
• Conversion rate: enquiries divided by visitors, shown as a percentage
• Bookings: how many enquiries turn into paid work

Put together, these show where the problem is. Plenty of visitors but few enquiries points to the website. Plenty of enquiries but few bookings points to follow-up or pricing. Good lead generation starts by finding which of these is leaking before spending more on traffic.

Cost per enquiry

Divide everything you spend on your website and marketing in a month by the number of enquiries it produces, and you have your cost per enquiry. Tracked over time, it is one of the clearest ways to compare channels and to see whether improvements are working.

• Website and hosting: often a small, fixed monthly cost
• Search optimisation: usually builds results gradually over several months
• Paid adverts: faster, but the cost stops working as soon as the spending stops

A well-structured site is usually the cheapest long-term source of enquiries, which is why web design for small businesses should be judged on the enquiries it brings in rather than its looks alone.

Sector numbers differ

What counts as a good figure depends on the trade. A clinic with high-value treatments may need far fewer enquiries than a trade business charging less per job, but it may also face rules on what it can advertise. SEO for aesthetic clinics, for example, has to grow enquiries while staying within advertising rules on prescription-only treatments, which changes which pages and searches are worth targeting.

Three charts worth keeping

• Line chart: monthly visitors and enquiries on the same axis, to show whether more traffic is producing more work
• Funnel chart: visitors, enquiries and bookings, to show where people drop out
• Bar chart: cost per enquiry by channel, such as search, adverts and referrals

Reviewed once a month, these figures make it easy to spot what is working and what needs fixing. For more on the numbers behind a new business, see our start-up businesses category.