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
-
Title Tag Change - Drop in Organic Placement?
I've been working on increasing CTR my changing the title tag & meta descriptions. Has anyone ever noticed a drop in organic SERPS from doing so? Even if CTR goes up? It seems to me that if the CTR goes up and user experience in that way is improved these changes should yield an increase in the average position. Would you agree? Thank you!!
On-Page Optimization | | leslieevarts2 -
Branded Product Dropping from 1st position. Why?
Hi All, I have a branded product that's always ranked 1st. It's a popular product which attracts the majority of our website's traffic. Now it's suddenly dropped from 1st to 20th. Can anyone advise me why this has happened? I've made no radical changes in the last month. keyword: Wattbike Atom Url:https://wattbike.com/gb/product/atom atom
On-Page Optimization | | WattbikeSEO0 -
Overnight Drop In Rankings
Over the last size eight weeks we have been doing all of our own SEO with the help of reading this forum and asking questions, prior to this we had an SEO company from India who were only doing articles and promoting them. We have been using various keywords by writing them into our own blogs, to check how we have been doing I have monitored two main keywords, when we started, our choice keyword was on page three, on Monday it had moved up to number one on page two, today it is now back on page three, have we been hit by the Penquin update, if so would I have received a warning in WMT, a lot of my other keywords across the site have moved down although some have moved up, we are retailers not SEO experts so it is a big blow to move down when everyone has worked hard, looking at some pages I do have some pages that look as though they have been keyword stuffed, I have altered some of them to see if anything changes, I have also look at some of the links but how do I know if I am doing the right thing?
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
E-commerce store having same content different language pages
Hello, I have an e-commerce store operating on PrestaShop. I have four languages Fr, De, En and Nl. The url for each page changes like Example.com/en/product1 Example.com/fr/Product1 Example.com/de/product1 Example.com/nl/Product1 All these pages have same content about product1 but translated in respective language. Is it considered as duplicate content? Should I suppose to write different content for each page?
On-Page Optimization | | MozAddict0 -
How do I cure 'overly dynamic' url's on an e-commerce website?
I've just launched an e-commerce website selling hosiery and have received aa report from SEO Moz regarding overly dynamic URL's. How do I resolve this issue - in words of one syllable please, I'm new to SEO! Here are three exapmles of over 120: http://www.yosassy.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=1&page=2 http://www.yosassy.com/index.php?route=product/product&filter_tag=&page=1&product_id=57 http://www.yosassy.com/index.php?route=product/product&filter_tag=&page=1&product_id=64 Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
E-commerce product and review pages
Hi, Can somebody tell me what is the best solution for optimizing review pages of product for e-commerce site? For now situation is this: When somebody write review for product, url-s automatically generate for review page. Review page has same page title, meta description (which is the product description) as product page and link with anchor (excact product name) point back to orginal product. The problem is that I often see in SERP that actually review pages rank better than original product pages. Regards, Nenad
On-Page Optimization | | Uniline0 -
Drop in Internal Links to Root
This morning I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that my internal links to my root domain (Home Page), dropped from 428,000 to 58,000. It appears that this could be my header or footer links back to the home page that Google is not showing any more. My programmers claim they have not made any changes over the last 30 days. My rankings and traffic are normal. Any cause for concern?
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090 -
Alt tag matching product titles - e-commerce
Hey all, Just wondering if it is ok to match the alt tag to product titles. Imagine an e-commerce site that lists a whole lot of products on any one page for any one category. Each product listing has a thumbnail image beside it. The easiest way to implement this dynamically is to use the product title for the alt tag. Anyone had any experience with this? Is it overkill / spam of keywords - given that the product title is repeated. Our current situation is that our alt tags are simply blank or say 'photo' which is no good, and we have hundreds of thousands of pages. Cheers, Croozie
On-Page Optimization | | sichristie0