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
-
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 -
Did anyone Rankings drop massively last weekend ...Is this new google update ?
Hi all, My Site rankings took a battering in the past week , From what I have read, I know that google have updated their algorithm and supposedly it only affects less than 1% of queries but I was very surprised to have fallen in that list... Just wondered, am i the only site to have been hammered this past week ? or is it more of a case that maybe the new algorithm means I need to be more savvy with our SEO. Just posting a quick general consensus question ... thanks Sarah
On-Page Optimization | | SarahCollins0 -
Problem with left navigation links on an e-commerce site diluting pagerank
I'm trying to decide how to deal with left navigation links on my e-commerce website diluting the amount of link juice passed to other links on the page. Any suggestions? Only options I can think of are: Nofollow the links use javascript (I'm assuming googlebots are still able to find these) Leave them as they are as followed links
On-Page Optimization | | Ralzaider0 -
Can Anyone Explain Ranking Drop?!?
Good Morning, I'm hoping someone out there can try and help me figure out what has caused my site to drop from #6 to #10 to #14 and now #19 for my main keyword.. ( My Site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e ) I am convinced that my site has the best/most unique content in this niche. Every other site uses the same manufacturer descriptions and info and i have added text to certain pages to try and give them more unique content. I believe that my site is very easy to use and navigate, and should be considered a great user experience... Any guidance or help would be greatly appreciated.... Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
Why is our site dropping in Domain Authority
Hi all, I have a question. I have been working SEO on our site www.betxpert.com for the last 4-6 weeks and I have been looking forward to seeing the new DA and PA numbers. However today, our DA is now 30...where it was 31 or 33 a couple of days ago. How come the decrease? I have only improved the site i should say... Hope someone can shed a little light on the issue... -Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
How to avoid keyword stuffing on e-Commerce Category pages
Hi, I'm optimizing a large, consumer electronic e-commerce superstore. Based on client's choice of keywords, I'm using product category pages as my target urls. Because of the proprietary CMS structure, product names and titles, featured on my landing pages (product category pages) create a keyword overkill, affecting various ranking factors. For example, one of the target urls / landing pages, dedicated to a specific product category, mentions the keyword over 190 times because of so many product titles in the "body" section. Would inline "rel="canonical" help? If yes, what part of the website should it "canonize"? If rel="canonical" is not the answer, what strategies would you suggest? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dimanyc0 -
Why did our ranking go up, then drop down again?
Hello SEOMoz community. I work for a website that runs a collectibles news service and sells collectibles online. I recently renamed one of the pages from "Stock for Sale" to "Collectibles for Sale" anticipating this would help our ranking for the term "collectibles for sale". This changes the Title, URL and h1 to Collectible for Sale. A few days later we were up to 5th on Google UK for that keyword. But now after the weekend we've dropped off the face of the earth... Or at least somewhere low down in the rankings. I imagine there could be multiple reasons for this, but what are the most likely causes? There is not much text on the page, it contains an iFrame with image boxes that link to relevant collectibles categories. Website: www.paulfrasercollectibles.com
On-Page Optimization | | PaulFraserCollectibles0