10 Things To Check When Your Conversion Rate Drops

Reading Time: 6 minutes

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!

At first, you might not think about it, but site speed has a HUGE impact on your conversion rate. Did you know that 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less? 

And that 40% of them will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds? Pretty crazy, right? Well, it’s no secret that nowadays website visitors aren’t patient. So if you have a slow website or landing page, they’re most likely going to bounce and not purchase from you.

According to Google, as your website page load time goes from 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 123%. So as you can see, a few extra seconds could not only kill your conversions but also create a frustrating user experience.

Checkout process

Have you ever thought about how complicated your checkout process is? Or better say, how easy is it for your customers to make a purchase? Around 87% of online shoppers abandon their carts during the checkout if the process is too long or complicated. 

But other than that, there are many other reasons for cart abandonment during checkout. According to Oberlo’s analysis, the most common reasons are unexpected extra costs and demanding customers to create accounts.

cart abandonments impact on conversion rate

We always recommend shortening the checkout process and make it super fast and easy. The bottom line is – the easier it is for the customer to make a purchase, the higher is your conversion rate going to 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 much 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 a period of 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).

call to action and conversion rate

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.

call to action change increase in conversion rate

The control version – Get your membership was already a great CTA. Very clear, and to the point – indicating what you’re going to get. But 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 are projected to reach $3.56 trillion in 2021 – 22 % more than the $2.91 trillion it registered in 2020.

mobile sales

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. 

conversion rate and mobile devices

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.

user experience on mobile

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.

facebook ads 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.

Conclusion

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 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.

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