How to engage and convert prospects from every customer channel

Learn what drives buyers to your website and gets them to stay beyond the first click

Marketers work so hard to drive prospects to their website using paid media, organic SEO, email, and social media, only for most visitors to leave as soon as they get there.

Over 60% of visitors leave a website after viewing a single page. And what’s worse, most web and marketing teams have no idea why.

Every departing visitor is a dollar lost in ROI. 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of testing and optimizing for isolated moments—a single landing page, a CTA, a product detail view. But that won’t give you any insight into the customer’s experience across the entire digital journey, the most important factor in their decision to engage.

Customers behave fluidly: they arrive, drop off, and return through different channels, and continue evaluating. From the moment a user clicks through from a paid ad, email, or organic search result, every touchpoint shapes perception, trust, and ultimately, conversion. 

Digital marketers face an urgent imperative: deliver compelling, relevant and frictionless experiences immediately after the click—or risk losing high-value traffic. The best way to do that is to understand the customer’s preferences, behaviors and motivations at crucial moments in their journey.

This guide helps web and marketing teams gain the insights they need to bridge the gap between acquisition and conversion. It outlines the tests to use, the tools to deploy, and the best ways to act on insights

Why your visitors are leaving

Even with growing investment in acquisition strategies, marketing teams are left with a critical blind spot: how users behave across their entire journey of engaging with a brand’s website. Most teams optimize their campaigns based on CTRs, CPMs, and CPCs—but lack visibility into the actual customer experience throughout. As a result, high-value traffic often drops off without explanation.

Here are the four key challenges standing in the way of stronger channel engagement:

1. Landing page experiences don’t match campaign expectations

Most marketing teams know where their traffic comes from—but analytics don’t tell the full picture of customer expectations when engaging via different channels. A visitor clicking through from a sponsored social post might expect rich storytelling that continues the message delivered on social; a visitor from paid might anticipate immediate and streamlined access to the promoted offer. When the landing page fails to meet these expectations—due to inconsistent messaging, design, or navigation—users become disoriented and disengage.

2. Analytics tools capture the sequence, but not the story

Marketers often use web analytics to view behavior by screen, device, or channel. But analytics tools don’t show the human insights behind how users interact with a home page, or pricing, or conversion page. They don’t explain if users expected to see more information, felt overwhelmed, or simply didn’t find what they expected. Marketing teams are left guessing by testing incremental improvements through A/B testing, rather than improving the website customer experience through validated customer feedback. 

3. Re-engagement is misunderstood

Returning users often have different expectations. They might be further along in their evaluation, or returning to complete a task they abandoned earlier. Web and marketing teams with access to only site analytics are left guessing at customer expectations upon re-engagement. Do visitors want to restart their journey and refamiliarize themselves with offerings? Or would directing users directly to the last product they browsed be more effective? Rather than guessing, getting qualitative feedback can help teams build journey continuity into their websites to convert already-engaged visitors.

Strategies to engage and convert every visitor 

To increase channel engagement, marketers need more than click data—they need to understand user expectations, intent, and perception across the full journey. 

That’s why testing how users experience your website across channels is critical. Whether they land from paid media, social, email, or organic search, every touchpoint should feel seamless, intuitive, and connected to the campaign that brought them there. 

The following strategies help uncover the gaps that reduce engagement, and show how to use customer insight to build cohesive, high-performing journeys.

Step one: Use web analytics to find where engagement breaks down

Before making any changes, start by identifying where users are falling off or failing to convert. Use tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Hotjar to spot high-exit pages, bounce-prone traffic sources, or content paths with poor conversion rates.

What to look for:

• High-traffic pages with high bounce or low engagement
• Funnels where visitors exit before completing key steps
• Device or channel patterns (e.g., mobile drop-off or low conversion from email traffic)

This step helps you prioritize where to focus your efforts—but it doesn’t tell you why users are dropping off. That’s where qualitative feedback comes in.

Step two: Run task-based tests to understand real behavior

Once you know where to focus, you can dive deeper into understanding the why behind what’s driving these behaviors. Test focus areas of your website by giving users realistic goals and observing how they navigate. Do they find what they’re looking for? Are they confident in their next steps? Task-based tests reveal usability issues, content gaps, or unclear navigational menus that block engagement.

What to test:

• Can users find a product or offer without confusion?
• Do they complete key actions easily (e.g., check out, request a quote)?
• Are they navigating in the way your landing page intends?