Case study
Halo Financial, a foreign exchange and international money transfer firm, believed its website converted visitors at nearly 2%. My audit found that once a mis-attributed internal referral was stripped out, the real figure was 0.4%, with mobile close to zero. I turned that hard truth into a full digital strategy and the brief for a responsive rebuild.
Halo was established and busy, but its website was quietly underperforming, and the team could not see it clearly because the measurement itself was broken. Traffic looked healthy, conversion looked acceptable, and nobody quite trusted the numbers. They were heading towards spending real money on a rebuild without an honest picture of what was actually wrong, which is the most expensive way to start a project.
I ran a full digital audit across the whole estate before recommending a single change. Analytics, PPC, hosting, SEO, the website itself, social media, the competitor set, the audience, email, an offline collateral review, and a customer survey to hear it from the clients directly. Then I turned the findings into a strategy the business could act on.
The findings were blunt. The apparent 1.93% conversion rate was propped up by a single internal referral from a sister domain that was recording a 31.9% conversion; take that out and the true site conversion was 0.4%, against an internet median nearer 4%. Mobile was being ignored, with more than 38% of visitors on phones and tablets converting at 0.11% against 0.31% on desktop. The measurement was broken in ways that mattered: email traffic was untracked, AdWords was not linked to analytics, goals were not firing on the thank-you pages, and the PPC numbers disagreed with each other depending on which report you read. The SEO foundations were shaky, with more than 1,500 duplicate page titles and a backlink profile dominated by "friendly" links from sister sites, an old blog alone pushing over 1,700 sidebar links. Social looked busy at 5,450 followers but sent fewer than 2% of them to the site. And the site itself was cluttered and dated, with forms so long and a sign-up CAPTCHA so broken that one page was seeing 75% abandonment.
From there I built the strategy. SMART objectives and KPIs, a phased action plan from quick wins through to long-term work, a content plan, four customer personas, and a clear technical direction: a responsive rebuild with marketing given control of the site and separated from the secure account area, a proper CMS evaluation weighing the in-house .NET options against faster PHP ones, fixed and trustworthy tracking, and a simpler two-stage account-opening flow.
The deliverable was clarity and a plan the business could act on: an honest baseline of 0.4% rather than the comforting 2%, a prioritised roadmap, and a brief a rebuild could actually be built from. I went on to lead the search for the agency to build it and to project-manage the full build, and those are separate stories. The post-launch performance figures belong with that build, so I have kept this piece to what the audit and the strategy delivered rather than borrowing numbers from the next chapter.
Before you spend a penny rebuilding a website, find out whether your numbers are telling you the truth. This firm was about to invest against a conversion rate five times better than reality and a mobile experience it did not know was failing. An honest audit is the cheapest money you will spend on a project, because it stops you from solving the wrong problem beautifully.
One mis-attributed source is enough. A sister domain was sending traffic recorded at 31.9% conversion, because those visitors were already partway through signing up when they arrived, and that single source dragged the whole site average to 1.93%. Strip it out and the real rate across everything else was 0.4%.
Because the audit decides what the rebuild is for. This firm was about to invest against a conversion rate five times better than reality and a mobile experience it did not know was failing. The audit is the cheapest work on any project, and it stops you solving the wrong problem beautifully.
The whole estate before a single change is recommended: analytics, PPC, hosting, SEO, the website itself, social, the competitor set, the audience, email, an offline collateral review, and a customer survey so the clients get a say directly.
The review behind this is a digital health analysis. On the same trap in your own numbers, see the website metric that is quietly flattering your numbers.
A long-established stockbroker whose own staff called the website frustrating, handed an evidence-based plan for a rebuild.
Read the case study →The audit that produced this baseline, run across analytics, search, content, technology and the competitor set.
See how it works →Most clients begin with a conversation. No pitch, no hard sell.
Just a straightforward discussion about where you are and whether I can help.
Book a free 30-minute call