Your website is crucial for getting demos booked as a SaaS business.
But how do you know if it’s doing the right things?
Check out how to get the most out of your SaaS website today.
Your website is crucial for getting demos booked as a SaaS business.
But how do you know if it’s doing the right things?
Check out how to get the most out of your SaaS website today.
Nowadays every man and his dog has a website, in fact, there are more than 1.5 billion websites out there right now. And it’s no different for SaaS businesses. Your SaaS website should act as a shopfront, clearly explaining what you and your product does. At the same time it needs to attract buyers, acting as a conversion magnet by getting those all important demos booked.
But how do you know if your website is working for you? In this article, we explore what makes a good SaaS Website and the key metrics you need to track.
A good website is like an orchestra, different sections doing different jobs all pulling together to create a successful website. But it should be able to do these 3 key things:
First and foremost you need to get your buyers to your website. This comes down to ‘discoverability’. The most common ways to get your business discovered is via search engines, content marketing, social media, events and even paid advertising. The trick here is ensuring that your strategies across these channels are tailored to the needs of your audience in order to get the right people to your site.
Secondly, first impressions count. Did you know that visitors typically only spend 10 to 20 seconds on a website. This means your website messaging needs to be clear, concise and stick out against competitors. This comes down to having a buttoned down value proposition that demonstrates why someone should care, what you do and how you will meet your prospects’ pain points. There’s nothing worse than SaaS websites bursting with complicated buzzwords that leave you asking “So what is it they actually do?!”
For SaaS businesses your website will be your main point of entry for potential prospects looking to book a demo. Having an effective CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) strategy will help to nudge these people towards the outcome you want on your website. Without this you’re stuck with lots of visitors to your site not doing what you want them to do.
There are many factors to consider when it comes to your website, but it’s critical your website can do these 3 key things. So how do you do this, and how do you measure whether it’s working?
How prospects get to your website will vary from business to business. Typically we have mentioned this will be a combination of traffic from search engines, content marketing, social media, events and even paid advertising.
Unless you’re starting from scratch, getting more of the right people to your B2B SaaS website starts with gaining an understanding of how they are already getting there now, to do this you’ll look at your website traffic sources.
If you’re starting from scratch this is still helpful to understand as it will help you plan what tactics you should dive into first.
Traffic sources are simply the origin that gets each visitor to your website. They help you understand which specific source locations are attracting more or less users, giving you a good overview of the flow of traffic to your B2B website.
To see your traffic sources more clearly, you should be looking at your Google Analytics. Google Analytics not only collects data from your site, but it also tracks and reports all of your traffic.
There are several types of traffic sources you can leverage to really get those visitors coming to your website. We often get asked what these are, and what they mean so we have create a simple table below explaining it all 👇
Traffic Source | Explanation |
Direct | Direct traffic refers to users who visit a website by typing the URL directly into their browser or using bookmarks. |
Search / Organic | Organic search traffic comes from search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo when users find a website through a query. |
Email traffic represents visitors who click on links within emails to reach a website. | |
Referrals | Referral traffic comes from other websites when users click on links that lead to the website in question. |
Display Ads | Display ad traffic is generated when users click on ads displayed on websites, apps, or social media platforms. |
Social / Organic | Organic social traffic is traffic generated from unpaid posts, shares, or interactions on social media platforms. |
Social / Paid | Paid social traffic is traffic generated from sponsored posts, ads, or promotions on social media platforms. |
Search / Paid | Paid search traffic refers to visitors who click on paid advertisements within search engine results pages (SERPs). |
The most common traffic sources SaaS businesses have when they first start out are direct and organic search.
Direct traffic usually indicates that these visitors already know about your brand. Perhaps they saw you at an event, read an article from your PR team or have been seeing your content on social media and came back to check you out. This is known as brand awareness. Having a brand awareness strategy is important as at any time 95% of your buyers are not in buying mode. Which means that you have a job to be at the forefront of their minds when they are ready to buy.
Brand awareness and therefore direct traffic rely on you getting your message out there via content, PR, events and other means.
Organic traffic is from people searching related keywords to your brand. It can be one of the best drivers of traffic to your website. To succeed in organic search you need to identify those commonly searched keywords in your niches and craft SEO content so your business comes up on Google.
These are results that are earned rather than paid for, and shows that your brand may be relevant or valuable to the user through the relation of keywords. But, this is a difficult channel to grow, as the rankings are constantly changing and it can take time to earn your place on the first page of search engines.
Paid traffic can come from multiple sources – Paid social like Linkedin, Search results ads on Google or even Display ads that appear across multiple websites. For early stage startups who don’t yet rank organically or have a large volume of direct traffic, paid is a good option. Paid advertising allows you to gain a great reach (driving more traffic) and target a specific audience. Ideally, you don’t want to become reliant on these channels as they are expensive – but they do help in the short term and are great for experimentation for your organic strategy.
Email traffic comes from email campaigns or newsletters you might be sending to your existing leads. It’s typical to see spikes in traffic when you send out email communications. This is a relatively ‘cheap’ channel and can drive meaningful relationships. Whilst you don’t want to spam your audience, frequent email with relevant and valuable content is a good way to ensure you are front of mind when they come to purchase.
Referral traffic to your SaaS website could be from your SaaS platform if you run customer referral programmes or more typically it’s from other websites pushing back to your own – this could be from partner marketing, blog or content exchanges or online communities. If your SaaS product has integrations this could be a good marketing tactic for your brand. Reach out to those integration partners, let them know what you have built and explore joint marketing opportunities.
Something that is an absolute non-negotiable that influences all your traffic sources is having effective content that offers value. Ultimately you could have the best working website in the world, but if you have no strong content that’s being pushed to your audience, then they will never get to see it. Your content needs to focus on building trust and showcasing expertise, in order for customers to find you valuable and in turn visit your website.
Our advice is, if you’re starting out, it’s better to focus on growing organic traffic. However, as your marketing function develops, focusing on brand identity and awareness campaigns is a good idea, as well as PR, events or any other channel that generates a buzz around your business to help grow organically. It’s a great benchmark to aim for a focus on that organic traffic, whilst incorporating a mix of other traffic sources to ensure you’re covering all bases and getting a range of different sources to your site to see what’s working.
When you first start up a SaaS business you need to focus on becoming credible. People don’t just book demos unless they know who you are and can clearly see the value you offer. To get to a place where your website is churning out demo requests you need to have a strategy to get in front of the right audience and get them to come and explore your product on your website. Once they are on your website that’s when you need to clearly demonstrate your value.
With less than 15 seconds to grab the attention of your audience your website needs to clearly and concisely explain what you do. Here are our top tips for effectively demonstrating the unique value proposition of your product or service on your website:
Assessing user engagement metrics provides valuable insights into how effectively your content resonates with visitors. Key metrics to consider include:
Evaluating whether your B2B SaaS website effectively addresses your target audience’s pain points and needs is key for enhancing engagement and driving conversions.
When it comes to maximising the impact of your marketing efforts, one of the key things to focus on is getting demos booked. Once you have the right people visiting your site and engaging with your content, it’s crucial to start making informed decisions about the quality of that traffic.
To do this we would look at historical data, and find out things like what traffic sources tend to convert into opportunities and identify any trends where a particular source of traffic may not progress to the opportunity stage. We also look at the time it takes for a user coming from a specific source to take action, such as subscribing to the newsletter, filling in a lead form, or crucially, booking a demo.
By understanding these metrics, you can really vamp your marketing efforts to attract and engage high-quality leads, ultimately driving conversions and getting those demos booked.
There are several tools to help with this:
Conversion rates are great for seeing how effective your site is at driving desired actions from visitors. By monitoring conversion rates at various stages of the funnel you begin to understand how well your website is performing in converting visitors into leads and leads into customers.
Your SaaS website is an extremely crucial part of supporting the growth of your business, from attracting the right people in, demonstrating value and getting the demos booked to drive ARR. So, it’s important to have a good understanding of the factors that play into this and the data you can use to make informed decisions.
Here at Codi we help SaaS businesses attract valuable traffic, define their value proposition, get more demos and much more. If you need some help get in touch with us to speak to an expert.