How to check your website and social pages for lost leads

A lost lead is a customer who wanted to reach you and could not, or who could but gave up partway. These are hard to see, because nothing in your reports records a message that was never sent. You see the enquiries that arrive. You do not see the ones that turned away at a slow page, a form that went nowhere, or a post that asked for nothing.

This article is a check you can run on your own business in an afternoon. It has three parts: your site opened on a phone, every path a customer can use to reach you, and the last month of your social posts. At the end there is a way to rank what you find, so you spend your time on the faults that cost the most leads rather than the ones that annoy you most. If you would rather not do it yourself, a person on the 360REV team runs the same check and sends it back by email.

Start on a phone, not a desktop

Most people who find you for the first time do it on a phone, often from a search result or a link in a message. So your phone is the right place to start. Open your own site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wi-fi, and watch it the way a stranger would.

Time how long it takes before you can read and tap something. This matters more than it looks. When a page takes around a second to respond, the visitor's train of thought is interrupted and they notice the wait, even if they stay [1]. By about ten seconds, their attention has gone elsewhere and they are likely to leave or start another task [2]. A site that feels quick on a fast office connection can feel slow on a phone in a car park. Test it where your customers are.

Then look at the things you touch. Buttons and links need to be large enough to hit with a thumb without zooming. The accepted minimum for a touch target is 44 by 44 CSS pixels [3]. If you find yourself pinching to zoom before you can tap "Contact" or "Book", so will everyone else, and some of them will not bother.

Work through this short list on the phone:

• Can you read the main message without zooming?
• Can you find the phone number and the contact option in the first few seconds?
• Does the menu open and close cleanly?
• Do photos load, or do they sit as grey boxes?
• Is the main call to action one clear thing, not five competing ones?

Write down what you find. You are not grading design. You are counting the moments where a real customer would hesitate.

Try every way a customer can reach you

Now list every path a person could use to contact you. Most businesses have more than they remember. A typical list is: a contact form, a chat widget, a phone number, email, and messages through Facebook and Instagram. Each one is a door. A door is only useful if someone is behind it.

Test each path as a customer, not as the owner. Fill in your own contact form with a real message and send it. Then go and check: did it arrive, where did it land, and how long did it take someone to see it? A form that quietly emails an address nobody reads is the same as no form at all. We have written before about how easily website form leads get scattered or lost between tools, and the fix is usually to make every submission land somewhere a person actually looks.

Do the same for the rest. Send yourself a Facebook message and an Instagram message and see whether anyone would notice. Ring the number and check that it is the right number and that voicemail is set up. The common failure here is not a broken door; it is a door that opens into an empty room. Messages come in across five places and nobody owns any single one of them. Pulling customer messages into one inbox is less about tidiness and more about making sure that a reply happens at all.

For each path, note two things: does it work, and who is responsible for answering it. If the answer to the second question is "nobody in particular", that is a lost-lead risk even when the technology is fine.

Read a month of posts

Open your Facebook and Instagram and look at the last thirty days of posts. You are not judging whether they are pretty. You are looking for a pattern in what happened after you pressed publish.

Sort them in your head into three piles:

• Posts that got comments or messages. What did these have in common? Often it is a question, an offer, or a clear next step.
• Posts that got likes but nothing else. People noticed and moved on. Pleasant, but not a lead.
• Posts that got nothing. Worth asking whether they were worth the time to make.

The thing most small businesses miss is that a post can be seen by hundreds of people and still ask for nothing. No invitation, no link, no reason to reply. Likes are not leads. A month of posts tells you whether your social pages are a shop window or a notice board. This is one of the quieter places that small businesses lose money without ever seeing it on a report.

Rank the fixes by the leads each one costs

By now you have a list of faults. Do not fix them in the order you found them. Rank them by the number of leads each one is likely to cost, which is roughly how many people meet the fault multiplied by how many of them give up.

A broken contact form on your busiest page costs far more than a slow page that few people visit. A missing call to action across a whole month of posts may cost more than either, because it fails quietly and every day. Put a rough number next to each fault: "maybe ten enquiries a month" is good enough. Precision is not the point. Order is.

Then pick the top three to fix, and leave the rest for later. Three real repairs beat a list of twenty you never finish.

One quick win this week

From your ranked list, choose the fix that is both high on the list and quick to do. For many businesses it is one of two things: making the contact form land in an inbox a person checks every day, or adding one clear next step to your social posts. Do that one this week. You can decide the rest later.

If you would rather have someone do this check for you, we offer a free check-up of your site and social pages, written by a person. You send your website address, or your Facebook or Instagram page if you have no website, and you get back three things that work, three to fix ranked by the leads each one costs, and one quick win for this week. No account, and no sales call.