Late afternoon, as part of my daily writing routine, I take one takeaway from my day’s work and write an article as a lesson for founders… and every founder I speak with wants more traffic… so let’s dig down into why traffic may not be the growth fix you’re looking for.
More visitors. More reach. More spend behind the ads. The logic feels … logical, if more people see the store, more people will buy. Hence the need for more traffic.
So they push for traffic. They run Google Ads. They invest in SEO. They scale Meta spend following all the advice deemed to be ‘opportunities’ by the AI lords of Meta. And you get exactly what you asked for… more traffic.
More traffic. Flat revenue. Higher CAC.
Because traffic is not the problem. The store is the problem. And no amount of traffic fixes a store that was never built to convert.
Driving more traffic into a store that does not convert is not a growth strategy. It is an expensive way to confirm that something is broken.
The Misunderstanding
There is a belief that conversion rate optimisation is something you do later. Once you have traction. Once the traffic is flowing. Once the brand is established.
This is the wrong order.
The need for speed in ecommerce, and the biggest quick hit you can get as an ecommerce founder is traffic, leaves you disappointed…
Conversion work is not a refinement you layer on top of a working acquisition machine. It is the foundation the acquisition machine sits on. Get it wrong and every pound you spend on traffic is working at a discount.
Think about what that actually means commercially.
If your store converts at 1% and you spend £10,000 on traffic, you are generating 100 sales. Fix the store to 2% and those same 100 sales cost you £5,000. You have not cut your ad spend. You have made it twice as efficient.
That is not a marginal gain. It is a structural shift in the economics of the business.
Most founders never see it this way because conversion work feels slow and incremental. Traffic feels like momentum. Ads feel like action. But spending more on acquisition while the store leaks customers is not momentum. It is a treadmill.
A store converting at 1% with a £10,000 ad budget and the same store converting at 2% are not the same business. One is twice as profitable as the other before a single extra pound is spent.
What Is Actually Happening
When I start working with a brand, the traffic number is rarely the first thing I look at. I look at what happens after the traffic arrives.
I could sit here and tell you that I follow a checklist;
- What are visitors doing on product pages?
- Where are they dropping off?
- What does the checkout path look like?
- What are post-purchase surveys telling us about why people did, and did not, buy?
A list of ‘conversion metrics’…. but I don’t. Instead I hone in on one question, ‘how does this store make me feel?’
I’ll break that question down further…. does this store make the products feel like they were made for me? Do I feel like 100s more people have trodden the same path as me and felt relief/delight when using their products? Are they doing everything possible to install confidence in me to purchase?
I’m not looking at metrics, I’m seeking out a vibe. That’s how you work when you’ve been doing this job for 25 years. You work from your experience first. Only then do you dive down into the metrics to validate.
In most cases I find the same set of problems.
- Product pages that describe the product but do not sell it. Features listed, benefits absent. No customer voice, no social proof placed where it matters.
- Messaging that speaks to the brand rather than the buyer. What the company believes in, not what the customer is worried about.
- Trust gaps at the point of decision. No answers to the questions a hesitant buyer is asking before they commit.
- Checkout friction that could be removed in an afternoon but has been left in place for months.
None of this requires a rebuild. None of it requires a new platform or a new agency. It does require change. It requires attention, customer insight, and the willingness to treat the store as something that can always be made better.
That last part is the hardest. Because founders are busy. And the store feels finished (“it works!”), even when it is not performing.
The Reframe
So, let’s go back to ‘The question’ It’s not: how do I get more traffic?
Instead ask, what is this traffic worth right now?
If a visitor arriving at your store today is worth 80 pence and you can make them worth £1.20, you have changed the ceiling on what you can spend to acquire a customer. You can outbid competitors. You can afford better placements. You can invest more in content and organic channels that compound over time.
The conversion rate is not just a metric. It is a multiplier that sits underneath every channel you operate. Improve it and the entire system improves with it.
This is what I mean when I say ecommerce growth is a machine. The channels are not independent. They connect. What happens on the landing page affects what Google can learn from the traffic you send it. What happens at checkout affects your email list quality and your repeat purchase rate. What happens post-purchase affects your review volume, your word-of-mouth, your LTV.
Fix the store and you are not just improving conversion. You are improving the quality of input into every other part of the machine.
The conversion rate is a multiplier sitting underneath every channel you operate. Improve it and the whole system improves.
The Principle
Fix first. Then grow.
That is not a cautious approach. It is the commercially rational one.
Before you scale acquisition, know what a visitor is worth. Before you invest in content, know that the page they land on will do the job. Before you push spend into Performance Max or broaden your keyword strategy, know that the traffic you already have is being converted at its potential.
The brands that grow consistently are not the ones spending the most on traffic. They are the ones with stores that work. Stores where every pound of traffic spend produces more than it should. Stores where customers land, find answers, build trust, and buy.
Those stores did not arrive at that point by accident. They got there because someone decided to treat conversion as a system to be operated and improved, not a number to be checked occasionally.
That is the machine. And it starts with what you already have.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER….
- If you doubled your traffic tomorrow, would your store handle it? Would the conversion rate hold, or would you be paying twice as much to get the same result?
- Do you know your current conversion rate by traffic source, device type, and landing page? Or do you only know the blended average?
- What does your post-purchase survey data tell you about why visitors did not buy? If you do not run post-purchase surveys, what are you using instead?
- Where on your product pages are customers dropping off before reaching the add-to-cart? What questions are they leaving unanswered?
- When did you last run a structured optimisation sprint on your highest-traffic pages? Not a redesign. A structured test, grounded in customer insight.
Written By:
