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
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
-
Duplicate product content/disclaimers for non-e-commerce sites
This is more a follow-up to Rand's recent Whiteboard "Handling User-Generated & Manufacturer-Required Duplicate Content Across Large Numbers of URLs." I posed my question in the comments, but unsure it will get picked up. My situation isn't exactly the same, but it's similar: Our site isn't an e-commerce site and doesn't have user reviews yet, but we do have maybe 8 pages across 2 product categories featuring very similar product features with duplicate verbiage. However, we don't want to re-write it because we want to make it easy for users to compare apples-to-apples to easily see which features are actually different. We also have to run disclaimers at the bottom of each page.\ Would i-framing the product descriptions and disclaimers be beneficial in this scenario, with the addition of good content? It would still be nice to have some crawlable content on those pages, so the i-framing makes me nervous unless we compensate with at least some above-the-fold, useful content that could be indexed. Thanks, Sarah
On-Page Optimization | | sbs2190 -
Sudden drop in ranking for important keyword? No penalty / other issues detected
Hi For our site we previously ranked well for the term "botswana safari holidays" on the page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx We've suddenly seen a dramatic drop for this term, currently ranked #43 on Google UK. There are no penalty notices in Webmaster tools and the only edits to the page recently have been to include the term "Botswana safari holidays" in the page title and the on-page h2 (previously Botswana safaris and holidays). Any suggestions why we have seen a large decrease for this term? We expect to see some fluctuation but this one seems a bit dramatic. We've not lost any backlinks to the page that we know of. Thanks for the help.
On-Page Optimization | | KateWaite0 -
Is it still worth changing a url with half the pages target keyphrase in to the entire phrase still ?
Hi If a pages url has half the pages target keyphrase (i.e. 1 word instead of 2) is it still worth changing to include entire keyphrase (2 words) given need to then add 301 redirects etc after ? If it was a new page then I would definately include full keyphrase but the page is a few months old and has quite high page authority as is (i know a 301 should transfer most authority) but given this page and other sub pages would also need to be 301'd if this change occurs and the dev time/cost that would incurred/charged by the design/dev agency. Also thinking Google being cleverer now (the pages content will be about the target kw) so thinking G would work it out from rest of page content and partial match kw in url. In other words to best target keyphrase is it best to leave url as is or change url to include keyphrase ? For example if the pages target kw is 'swimming clubs' and the current url is www.franksleisurecentres.com/clubs changing it to www.franksleisurecentres.com/swimming-clubs :Thanks Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
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 -
My site has been dropping, not sure why!
My site has been dropping in the rankings, not sure - my metrics seem better than my competitors. Historically I have been a very stable #2 for my main term, but now it's down to 7! According to SEO Moz, my domain authority is 32, while my better performing competitors are are 26, 11, and 1! Have more links than they do. Trying to think it through, not sure what is happening. My home page bounces at a low 20%-ish, other Google Analytics are good. I have a company Facebook account, occasionally upload YouTube vids, do online press releases, etc. I do have to target several metros scattered across the state, while my competitors usually focus on one major metro. I do have some SEO Moz errors, which focus on dup content due to our web editor's naming system. An example would be domain.com/keyword-keyword-i-14 vs. domain/differnet keyword-different better keyword-i-14. 14 would be the actual page number. Our system lets me change the page title keywords, as I've added new links and pages over the years there are some dupes. The only major change is I've added a password protected section for sales rep materials. The hosting/web guru firm we use has assured me Google doesn't see pages behind the password portection. Not sure if Google is testing a new SERP formula. All social media or non-website results seem to have dropped out of search for my terms. Just local business sites like mine and some directory sites remain. Any advice or private consult would be greatly appreciated as I am a ... self taught 'OneManBand' for high tech marketing in our company. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OneManBand0 -
Home page ranking dropped below internal pages
The index page for a site I manage has dropped significantly - internal pages rank above it. It's a new site, 2 months old but was ranking at 1st. Any suggestions as to how I can debug this?
On-Page Optimization | | OptioPublishing0 -
SEO for E-Commerce
Hello Guys, First of all, I wanna say that I just have some 1-2 years experience in SEO, I´m not a GURU or expert ok? So, take it easy... I have one costumer which wanna develop a E-COMMERCE focusing SEO and best pratices of web development. What care should I have? I mean the most important issues... From the coice of domain name to very specific point. What is the main mistakes SEO made at develop a E-COMMERCE? Thanks so much 😃
On-Page Optimization | | augustos0 -
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