Traffic is not the problem, the leak is

List every place a visitor can become a lead: your homepage, your top five landing pages, blog posts with a form, a contact page, a pop-up, a newsletter sign-up. For each one you need three numbers for the last 90 days: visitors, captured leads and the conversion rate (leads divided by visitors).

Pull visitors from your analytics tool, for example Google Analytics, and leads from your CRM, for example HubSpot. Put all of it in one sheet. If the two systems disagree, note the gap and carry on. A rough number today beats a perfect one next month.

Work out what a better rate is worth. Say a page gets 10,000 visitors in 90 days and converts 1.5 per cent. That is 150 leads. At 3 per cent, the same visitors give you 300. You have doubled your leads without a single extra visitor, and the improvement carries across every channel that sends people to that page. Doubling the traffic would take far more effort and spend. The numbers in your sheet will be different, but the sum is the same.

Sort the sheet by visitors. Look for pages with plenty of traffic and a conversion rate near zero. Blog posts are the usual culprits. They attract the most readers and often have no offer at all. That is where a good fix pays back first. For ideas on placing offers where attention already is, read Capture where attention already is.

Pick the worst page and watch what visitors do. A tool such as Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity shows scroll depth, clicks and session recordings. Ask three questions:

1. Do they scroll far enough to see the offer?
2. Do they click the button and then stop?
3. Do they start the form and abandon it?

For forms, compare the number of people who start with the number who submit. A big drop between the two points to the form itself. Forms that convert explains how to adjust fields and layout.

The average hides differences. Break the rate down by traffic source: organic search, paid, email, social, referral. One source may convert at three times the rate of another. If so, the problem may be who you attract, not the page. Track submission by source shows how to set that up.

Pick the single biggest leak and change one thing. It might be the headline, the button text, the number of fields or where the offer sits. Run it for long enough to collect a meaningful number of visitors, then keep it or revert it. Test the capture mechanics, do not redesign them on a hunch covers the discipline.

Write a floor for each main page, such as "no new paid traffic to this page until it converts at least X per cent". Pick X from your own best page. This rule stops you from paying full price to push people through a page you know is weak. It also gives you a clear signal for when traffic is the real constraint: when your best pages convert well and there still are not enough visitors.

• Looking at one blended conversion rate for the whole site. It hides your best and worst pages.
• Counting any form fill as a lead. If half of them are junk, your real rate is half what you think.
• Redesigning the whole page at once. When the rate moves, you will not know why.
• Chasing the page nobody visits because it converts at 20 per cent. Small numbers mislead.
• Fixing the page and ignoring follow-up. A captured lead you do not follow up on is a wasted lead.

You can state the conversion rate of your five main entry points without opening a spreadsheet. The worst page improves after a test. Cost per lead falls on the same spend. And the next time someone says "we need more traffic", you can answer with a number: which page, which rate and what it would take to fix it first.