Your digital marketing campaign is meant to achieve one ultimate goal: to drive conversions. While it should be engaging and provide a valuable experience for visitors, it won’t do you much good if no one buys anything, so conversions are one of the primary metrics you track.
What happens if your conversion rates begin dropping? This doesn’t necessarily mean that your efforts are no longer working. There could be other explanations. Here some of the things you should explore if your conversion rates are heading in the wrong direction.
When your conversion rates drop, the first thing you should check is whether there are any errors on your website. Pretend you’re a visitor and click through the different pages on your site. Add something to the shopping cart and simulate checking out. This is a good first step, but you may also want to use a more technical auditing tool that will identify errors more quickly so that you can address them immediately.
Even if there are no site errors, you might have some issues with your tracking code. In other words, your conversions might be the same, but they simply aren’t being recorded properly.
If you’re using Google Analytics, you can troubleshoot your tracking code to identify problems. Run a test on your “thank you” page to see if it is recording a conversion.
If you’re selling and processing payments directly from your website, the problem might lie with your payment provider. If customers are unable to complete the purchase when they reach the checkout screen, this will have a significant impact on your conversion rate.
It’s vital that you review your payment gateways regularly to ensure that they are working as intended. Likewise, you should offer customers as many payment options as possible so that it is easy to complete the transaction.
Have you made any design or technical changes to your website over the past several months? These are generally meant to optimize the user experience, but sometimes they have the opposite effect.
Even if your changes were beneficial, someone might have forgotten to install the tracking code to collect conversion data. Get together with your developer to review any recent changes to see if these might be the culprit.
Have you recently made any changes to your pricing that might impact your conversion rates? Consumers are sensitive to price, so it’s certainly possible that a competitor is matching or beating what you’re offering.
Maybe you recently had a sale that boosted your conversions, and now those promotions have ended. Changes to both your competitors' and your own pricing can impact your conversions, so it’s vital that you track this closely and have a plan in place to make adjustments.
Just because you’re selling the same products that you were a month or a year ago, you can’t expect that conversions will remain the same. Consumer preferences change, and this is going to impact performance and sales.
Is your product something that is trendy and likely to fizzle out with time? Or is it something that consumers will always want and need to some extent? Keep a close eye on your industry as well as analytics to spot any change in trends so that you can react before conversion rates drop too drastically.
Do you know where most of your website traffic is coming from? Instead of being a technical issue with your site or some other problem already listed, you may need to reach further back to the source of your traffic.
If most of your traffic comes from Google, your website ranking may have slipped. Perhaps the search engine giant has rolled out another algorithm update, and this impacts your rankings. Or, maybe you did make some changes to your site that affected your standings.
On the other hand, you might get a lot of your traffic from paid ads or social media sites. Take a close look at how these are performing. Are you still targeting the right audiences, or do you need to make some adjustments? If you’re getting a ton of traffic to your site, but it’s not high quality, it’s a good idea to focus on quality rather than quantity.
People no longer have the patience or attention spans they once did. Slow websites are conversion and ranking killers. According to research, online shoppers want a website to load in 2 seconds or less. If it doesn’t, they’re likely to leave and find someone else.
Further, page speed is now a ranking factor with Google, so this is vital to your visibility. If you haven’t done so lately, or ever, test your site speed and do whatever is necessary for optimization.
If your industry fluctuates with the seasons, this is something you should have a thorough understanding of through analytics. For example, most retailers understand that they’ll see a strong spike in sales as the holidays approach and then a drop at the beginning of the year.
If your business is a new player or has some new products, you’ll want to start collecting data from the start so that you can map and predict seasonality. In most industries, you can also collect data and news for the sector that can help you explain a drop or spike in conversions.
Not all conversion rate issues are technical, but some are. To get to the heart of why your conversions aren’t where you need them, you’ll need to segment and dissect the data. We can help.
Request an assessment from Connection Model to validate your data and learn more about how our service can help you create the best possible online experience for your customers.
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