Real Business Examples

In this article we explore how many website visitors you can expect to get using 18 real life business examples. We take a look at their Google Analytics to find out how many visitors a website gets and where they are coming from.

The 18 businesses used in this case study come from the city of Adelaide in South Australia, which has a population of 1.3million. They vary from a lawyer, medical supply company, gift shop, business consultant to a software agency. We’ve taken a year’s data (from 1/6/20 – 31/5/21) and divided the results by 12 to give an average monthly result.

The number of visitors these websites had, on average per month, varied from 65 to 8,462.

Website Visitor Numbers

The most important number in Google Analytics is the number of visitors a website gets. It goes without saying, but let’s say it anyway, the more visitors a website gets, the better.

Less than 200 visitors

A business with a website that is getting fewer than 200 visitors a month cannot usually expect to get any new leads or sales from their website.

Some of the 7 businesses in our list with less than 200 visitors are month are:

• An established business consultant who has a website to establish her authority and knowledge in her industry. She does not expect, or promote her website with a view to getting new clients. It is there should a member of the government or prospective board wish to research her and discover her expertise and skill set.
• A newly established side hustle for online courses based out of an existing business
• A sole trader who has established a very niche business that is struggling to find traction
• Two e-commerce sites that have struggled to find the best way to promote their businesses and get the online sales they were hoping for

Except for the consultant, who doesn’t expect or need large numbers of website visitors, the websites for the businesses in the list of less than 200 visitors a month would be deemed to be failures.

300 – 1,000 visitors

We can see from the list of businesses in this category that they are starting to get some traction with their website. However this is still not enough website visitors to sustain a viable operation as we can see by the low numbers of sales for the online shop.

Some examples of the six businesses with 300 – 1,000 visitors a month are:

• An online shop that is getting about 2-3 sales per month
• A small charity
• An international keynote speaker and author who pivoted during Covid-19 from face-to-face speaking and training engagements to online courses

Over 1,000 visitors

At over 1,000 visitors a month, we see a website really starting to pull its weight in the marketing mix for businesses. The website is getting traffic and the business is getting leads.

1 in 4 of the businesses in our study had over 1,000 visitors a month. That means, 3 in 4 had less than 1,000 website visitors a month. This in itself is a telling statistic. It means that it’s hard work to get to over 1,000 visitors a month.

Not surprisingly it is the established businesses (over 5 years) that are in this category. It can take time to build a business and for a website to get traffic.

The five businesses who had over 1,000 website visitors a month are:

• An established small law firm
• A successful niche education training provider
• A small manufacturing business
• A small website agency
• A medium sized, national (i.e. Australia wide) medical supply company

So what conclusions can we draw from the above?

Newer businesses and newer websites tend to get less website visitors than established ones. When a business starts out it has to get known – and this takes time. I speak to a lot of businesses through the advisory sessions I give in Adelaide and I find it usually takes two years before a business is viable. This is reflected in the website visitor numbers. Not surprisingly, the established businesses get more website visitors.

The businesses who have struggled to find success, even after two years, are generally not getting many website visitors. Low visitor numbers can be seen in our examples with businesses that

• are a side-hustle with less investment than what would be given to a full-time committed effort
• are selling a product or service is not well known or desired by consumers
• have not been successful with their marketing and promotion

Blog writing example

The website agency provides an interesting example getting just over 5,000 visitors a month. 4,000 visits to the website are to one blog article. I’ve spoken to a number of blog writers and there is often 1 – 3 articles that end up being very successful because they just happened to be the ones that pick up a lot of traction in Google searches. These articles often get people from all over the world reading them. If this website agency is only providing services to customers who live locally, these website visitors are not likely to become customers. So one could argue, that even though blog writing is great for your SEO, it could be wasted energy. How-ever if you have products or services that can be delivered to anyone anywhere in the world, blog writing could be an attractive option.

Online course example

The keynote speaker who pivoted to online courses provides an interesting example especially compared with the niche education training provider and the website agency who had online courses as a side hustle. All three are established sole trader or partnership businesses who have been speakers, trainers, workshop facilitators and moved to online courses and seminars during Covid-19. The two who worked in the education sector, and could provide authorised professional development to teachers, managed to make the transition fairly well. This is reflected in their website numbers. The website agency who created a side hustle of online courses didn’t fare so well probably because

• the content in the courses can, to some degree, be found for free on YouTube
• they do not add points towards a worker’s professional development requirements
• they didn’t have quite the same tenacity and effort put into the marketing and promotion of the courses

How you market your services and how valuable those services are to your customers remain important factors in a business’s success. The two businesses who were more successful in launching their online courses provide a good example of this.

Where do the website visitors come from?

Organic searches are the most popular way people find websites. For 11 of our businesses this was the case. These people may have googled your business name or the type of product you sell or service you provide. If you have your Google Search Console connected to your Google Analytics account you can drill down to see what searches people use to find your site. To see this go to
Google Analytics>Acquisition>Search Console>Queries

For the remaining seven businesses, most of the visitors came directly to the website. This means they typed in the website address directly into their browser or used a bookmark or favourite they may have set up on their computer. Even though email can show up as a separate source in Google Analytics, I’ve often seen clicks from emails show up as direct visits.

Organic and direct combined, accounted for over ¾ of website visitors in all 18 of our business examples.

This is a typical chart from Google Analytics for a website that gets most of its visitors from organic searches.

This is a typical chart from Google Analytics for a website that gets most of its visitors from direct.

To find the chart for where your website visitors are coming from for your business go to
Google Analytics>Acquisition>Overview

What about website visitors from social?

Overall social accounted for very few visits to websites. The highest percentage of visitors from social was for our small charity which had 7% of visitors from social, as seen in this graph.

What about referrals?

People who show up as referrals are visitors to your website that have come from another website. Most of our businesses had very little referral traffic, only 5 had enough visitors from referrals that were of significant enough interest. The software agency had the most, at 20%, but over 65% of this is spam referral, which is not uncommon to see. The business who had the most legitimate referral visitors was the medical supply company at 16%.

By clicking on the Referrals link in Acquisition>Overview you can see which websites your referral visits are coming from.

Knowing how many visitors your website has, and where they are coming from, are the two most important statistics to look at in Google Analytics. To understand a little more about these two measurements as well as another three that are good to know, head over What to Measure in Google Analytics.

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