We've identified four structural gaps behind that pattern, and they hold true across the sector regardless of what's being made.
The primary reason comes down to how manufacturing sells. Purchases route through dealers and distributors rather than direct to the buyer, consideration cycles run long, and the product itself is often too complex to explain in a single landing page. The usual digital playbook, built for direct-to-consumer journeys, needs adapting before it works in a market like this.
Most digital strategy templates assume a straight line from visitor to purchase. Manufacturing rarely works that way. A buyer - or a multi-discipline buying team - researches online, contacts a dealer, and completes the transaction somewhere the website can't see. When the strategy doesn't account for that handoff, teams end up measuring the website against a conversion event that was never going to happen there, chasing the wrong number as a result.
The same handoff creates a data problem. The team tracks everything up to the enquiry in detail: page views, configurator use, brochure downloads, form fills or phone calls. Everything after it disappears into a CRM, a phone call, or a dealer's own system that never talks to the website's analytics. Without a way to connect what happened on the site to what happened at the point of sale, insight stops at exactly the moment it becomes commercially useful.
And with long lead times between first touch and sale, and a multi-channel, multi-touch buying cycle, marketing attribution is hard to get right.
Three groups typically hold digital ownership in manufacturing: a central marketing team running the website, a sales function managing key accounts, and a distributor network running local relationships. Each optimises for its own priorities, and none has full visibility of the customer journey the other two are shaping. Decisions that need input from all three, like which product content actually helps a dealer close a sale, take longer than they should because no single group owns the answer.
Product pages and configurators get optimised for engagement: time on page, tool completions, brochure downloads. These are useful signals, but they're a step removed from revenue, and in manufacturing that step is a long one. A configurator many buyers use and one that generates qualified enquiries for the dealer network are different things to measure, and typical reporting only shows the first.
Each of these gaps deepens the others. Strategy that doesn't account for the dealer handoff produces insight that stops at the same point. An operating model split three ways makes it harder to fix either. And performance metrics built around on-site engagement give leadership a picture of activity that says nothing about pipeline.
Closing them means connecting strategy, data, operating model and performance as one system inside our Optimise service, with the dealer and distributor journey built into the design from the start rather than treated as an edge case.
JCB worked with us to simplify a single step in its product configuration checkout, removing a specific obstacle for users. Their move from Sitecore to Optimizely with Mando Group delivered a 12% conversion uplift once we configured the platform properly around how the business actually sells.
Neither result came from more traffic or a bigger content budget; both came from closing a specific gap between what the platform could do and what the business needed it to do.
If you're not sure where your organisation's digital programme stands across strategy, insight, operating model and performance, the Digital Optimisation Health Check is a good starting point.