Many factors may impact your conversion rate. Understanding these factors and how to act on them is key if you want to get back on the right track.
So in today’s blog post, we’re breaking down the nine most important factors that may be hurting your conversion rate and that you should keep an eye on.
Let’s dive in!
Why is Your Conversion Rate Droppping?
When someone experiences a drop in conversion rate, a smaller percentage of visitors to their website are completing the desired action compared to previous periods. This desired action can vary depending on the website’s goals but typically is making a purchase.
Especially for e-commerce businesses.
The conversion rate can drop for many reasons, like:
- Slow page load
- Complicated checkout process
- Poor ad targeting
- Seasonality trends
- Recent changes on your website
- Rejected products for the product catalog
- Not optimized for mobile
- Wrong ad campaign objective
- Tracking code issues, and
- Poor abandoned cart flow.
Page load time
Checkout process
We always recommend shortening the checkout process to make it fast and easy. The bottom line is that the easier it is for the customer to make a purchase, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Facebook ad creative and targeting
Ad fatigue is a common problem that can occur when your campaign frequency gets too high. This causes your target audiences to see the same ads again and again, which leads to a drop in conversions. An optimal ad frequency is for retargeting campaigns is up to 7, while for prospecting up to 3.
So make sure to check your ad frequency and if needed, create a higher quality target audience. Also, keep an eye on your ad creatives and copy. If you know what ad image creative and copy works best for your business, make sure to keep those up and running.
Seasonality trends
Seasonality is also one of the factors that may be impacting your CR. For example, during the holiday season, you’re bidding against many more people, which ultimately means that you’ll experience a higher CPM. In that period the sales and CR normally go up, while in January the CR can drop again if you’re selling seasonal products.
So make sure to take this into consideration when analyzing your GA data, and always compare your sales with the same period of the previous year.
You can also use Google Trends to understand what type of seasonal patterns might be typical for your business. Simply enter a popular search term related to your business, and you’ll see a graph that details the popularity of that term over some time, broken down by month.
Recent changes on your website
Before making any changes to your website, we always recommend A/B testing it and let the performance decide. A minor change on your website can have a huge impact on the conversion rate. For example, changing the copy of your Call To Action (CTA).
Here’s an example of a case study that was conducted by Unbounce.
The goal was to get visitors to click through to the checkout flow where they can select a gym and sign up for a membership.
The control version – Get your membership was already a great CTA. Very clear, and to the point – indicating what you’re going to get.
However, after some research, they found out that the location of the gym is an important factor when deciding on a membership.
So just by adding “Find your gym”, they instantly added more value and relevancy, which ultimately increased the conversions by 68%.
Shopify product catalogs
If you’re using Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads (DPA), be sure to check your Product Catalog on Shopify. Review all your products to see if any products don’t comply with Facebook’s Advertising Policies.
Facebook can reject some of your products because they think you’re not following Facebook’s advertising guidelines for commerce products. In some cases, this is true, but in others, it’s probably their mistake. So if you think your products have been disapproved by mistake, you can fill out this form and Facebook will investigate the problem for you.
Optimize for mobile
According to Statista, mobile e-commerce sales reached $2.2 trillion in 2023 and now makeup 60 percent of all e-commerce sales around the world.
So most of your customers will be accessing your website from a mobile device. And because of that, you got to make sure the mobile UX/UI design of your website is on point.
Econsultancy examined 15 leading retail sites from the point of view of mobile shoppers. The goal was to help merchants understand their visitor’s experience and improve mobile UX.
The Facebook ads campaign objective
When creating a Facebook ads campaign, it’s important to choose the right objective. For example, if you’re using traffic as your campaign objective, Facebook will get you a lot of people who will click on your ad but not necessarily purchase your product.
This can lead to a low conversion rate because you’re not optimizing your ad campaign properly.
So if your business goal is to encourage people to buy your product, make sure to go with the conversions objective. And don’t forget to set the appropriate conversion event.
Tracking code issues
Another factor to consider when your CR drops is your tracking code. A minor mistake or change in your code could mean that you have tracking issues and your conversions are not showing up.
So, make sure to check if your Facebook Pixel and GA code are installed correctly.
Abandoned cart flow
Automated emails are a great way to recover abandoned checkouts. As we previously mentioned, around 87% of customers abandon their carts during checkout.
So not contacting these customers leaves a lot of potential conversions in the air. Depending on your e-commerce platform, you may already have a built-in abandoned cart flow. For example, if you use Shopify, you probably already have a Shopify abandoned cart flow.
But if you want to spice up the customization of your messages, there are many email marketing tools you can use.
So when you notice a drop in your conversion rate, be sure to check your abandoned cart flow. A potential bottleneck could be that the flow is not triggering when someone abandons their cart, leaving behind potential sales that could have been captured with abandoned cart emails.
Summing Up
Now that you know some of the most common factors that may hurt your CR, it’s time to start analyzing. Make sure to retrace your steps and put our tips into practice. If the abovementioned tips won’t help or you want to boost your conversion rates even higher, consider using software for website visitor tracking.
With the help of such tools, you can deanonymize the non-converting parts of your traffic and reach out to potential customers proactively.
If you have any questions on this topic, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected]. We are always happy to share useful advice and discuss the best ways of analyzing your data.
