Why would my E-commerce conversion rate have dropped by half?
-
I run a website selling used books. Our e-commerce conversion rate is on average around 1.40%. Over the last four days this has dropped to just 0.25%! Any ideas why? We haven't made any changes, apart from uploading a new pricing strategy - obviously you'd look at this first but the price of our whole inventory has gone DOWN by £5000 and our average product price has decreased from £3.43 to £3.09!
Everything else has stayed almost exactly the same, hits have decreased slightly, so has referral traffic.
-
first you need to compare search terms to see if your e-commerce conversion rate fell for your top terms.
-
That's exactly what I thought at first. Comparing the 11th/12th July to the 4th/5th July:
Our traffic for our brand name was down 3%. Our search traffic for 'cheap books' was up 8%. In fact our search traffic for our branded terms generally / brand name generally is down and our search traffic for 'cheap books', 'bargain books' and 'second hand books' is up slightly, maybe this, plus less traffic overall and less referrals from Facebook could explain the drop.
-
One suggestion is that, in this wild and crazy time of Panda, your keyword rankings changed. One of our sites experienced a spike in some keywords while dropping in others, which produced some oddball metrics for that site. So, let's say that "blue widgets" is a great converter (we'll say 2%) and gives you 250 hits a day, while all other keywords combined give you another 150 and drag that back to a modest 1.25% overall. Suddenly Panda eats your "blue widgets" keyword but likes you a LOT more for "fuchsia storm widgets", which only converts at 0.25%. So your traffic wobbles in your overall number but your traffic sources have drastically changed and, thus, your conversion rate has suffered. I've seen several of our sites experience this, where a short but good keyphrase dropped but several long tails came up sharply and offset the traffic drop.
Have you looked at how people are finding your site? Did keyword traffic change?
-
Yeah I think you are right Ryan, I'm not convinced that it is anything we have done. The average book price has gone down from £3.43 to £3.09 in our inventory which should only encourage sales! But we will definitely just wait it out - hopefully just a blip.
-
I hate to offer a "wait and see" response but at this point it seems we have too little data to work with for any other reply. There are so many factors that can influence a bump in the short term. Paydays, seasonal changes, news, etc. can all be a factor.
-
Hi Ryan,
Your first point is probably a good one, we're getting around 50-100 less visitors a day. Down from 420-450 to 350-380.
We haven't added any new content.
No changes as far as I'm aware regarding prices.
This time last week we got a good link from a famous authors blog/facebook so we got a lot of hits but our average conversion rate is 1.52% and we are down to almost 0.25% over the last few days. Comparing Jul 1 - Jul 4 conversion rate=1.52%, Jul 8 - Jul 11 conversion rate=0.83%.
Only change I can see between then and now is active inventory, down from 12696 SKU's to 12350 SKU's now. And referral traffic down from 15.24% to 5.59%
-
A few questions / ideas:
-
How many visitors are we talking about? If the sample size is small then it can always be a normal fluctuation.
-
Have you recently written an article or added any new content? It's possible you have a new source of traffic which is bringing in new traffic that does not convert well.
-
Has your traffic numbers for the last 4 days been consistent with what you expect? Has there been any significant increase or decrease?
-
Is it possible any other changes might have happened during the price change? GA tags removed, tax or shipping changed, etc
If none of the above turns up anything interesting, go through your store and buy one of your books. Examine the whole process and see if anything seems odd.
-
-
Checked! No drop in internet explorer vs firefox or chrome, slight drop in Safari but no technical errors in Safari
-
I have had a few problems like this and it has been due to bugs in the cart.
Start checking G Analytics - has there been a drop in sales for one type of user. (ie internet explorer vs chrome)....in my case my add to basket buttons were not performing properly in IE....hopefully you find your answer
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Optimizing an e-commerce website
Hi, What do you recommend me to optimice an e-commerce website to rank every page or product? Do I have to implement schema and meta description for every product or is easier to optimice every category?
On-Page Optimization | | AbacoDigital0 -
Index dropped 20 pages at once since yesterday
Hi community, I just realized that my indexed pages dropped from the amount of 95 to 75 and I don't know why. I did some title tag arrangements because we are launching with our first product (before that it was just a blog). I did these changes 1 week ago and fetched to google the homepage and some subdomains. Thanks for your help. Kind regards Marco
On-Page Optimization | | Marc19870 -
Total Links has doubled in less than one month!? Trust and Authority Drop
Hey Guys, Our website has just recently started to manage our website with SEO in mind and there are a few things that I am concerned about. 1. Domain authority, moztrust, mozrank have been dropping. 2. We had 368k links on 6/27 and on 7/11 we had 563k Is this a result of confusion between our www.websitenamehere.com and websitenamehere.com?
On-Page Optimization | | briggsb0 -
New content cause for drop? Still showing old cache though...
About 10 days ago I added about 750 words of new text to a homepage as it was simply a sign up landing page and rather sparse. I presumed that by adding content it would help google understand the content of the site as it is a single page on the root domain (as soon as users sign up they go to a subdomain). Yesterday though the site recieved a huge drop in traffic and now recieves almost no organic traffic at all from google. I've done the obvious like checked WMT for messages but I'm not sure as to what caused the drop. As far as I'm aware there were no confirmed google updates on 7/6/13. The strange thing is that when I check the google cache its about 3 weeks old so I'm guessing google is using the old cache to reference my site content against search queries. Does that mean the changes I made are not the cause for the drop in rankings? The title tag however has changed when the site is showin in the SERPS. How can that be if google has an old cache?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Low Bounce Rate
My site has a low bounce rate over the last 30 days of around 3%. I don't think that can be right can it? Could someone see if there is a problem with my analytics code. The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com [editor's note: site not safe for some workplaces]
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Authorship and 50% Drop in Search Traffic
Hi. I had some problems with my content being copied by other sites, and was suggested to claim my pages. Immediately after Google started listing the posts with my photo next to them my traffic picked up slightly but since, over the past few weeks, it has dropped by about 50%! It seems that the average position has declined (as has the CTR) At the same time as claiming authorship I added the post date to my articles which I have now removed. Does anyone have any ideas for me? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ben10000 -
Dropped rankings due to too many links, help needed
We have just re-designed our site and added a big drop-down navigation menu to help users get straight to the category/sub-category they are looking for, take a look at http://www.discountfiresupplies.co.uk to see what I mean. Since doing so our rankings have dropped which we've been told may be because there are now so many links on (particularly) the home page diluting the rankings of that page. We've been advised that if we hide the drop-down menus using "style='display: none'" until they are required that the search engines will ignore them which we have now done but is this correct or will they still be indexed? And if so do you have any other suggestions? Thanks, Tariq
On-Page Optimization | | tjhossy0 -
Are Forum Links To Website Causing Rankings To Drop ?
For many years our top keywords hve ranked in top 5. Usually top 3 for a few in particular. The last few months those particular keywords have dropped to 25 +. Our other rankings are doing pretty decent and are remaiing the same. We are members of about 6 forums since they relate to our website and sometime we have contests on them. I do know that the forums are based on those particular keywords and are linking to our website, as well as other forum members linking to us. Each forum has roughly 300 links to our website. It does not seem as if our competitors are affected by this, as they are members of the forums as well. What could be causing this for these certain keywords? If those forums were affected by Google's new algorythm would this have an affect on our website?
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0