We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a
healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their
conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in
today’s economy, panic ensues.
Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which
can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a
hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to
the root of the problem.
We’ll start at the “front†of the line with our problem-solving and
work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line
changes are much easier to address.
1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?
Check out your pay per click (PPC)
advertising keywords bringing in traffic. Compare the keywords from the
time period in which your conversion rate was good to the time period
for which you have not been getting conversions. Are the keywords
different?
For PPC, this is an easy problem to
solve – pause the keywords which have been taking up budget but not
bringing in leads. Then make sure the keywords that used to work have
bids that will enable them to get the most traffic.
2. Have the natural search keywords that are bringing traffic to your site changed?
Comb through your analytics to get the
list of natural search queries that were bringing people to your site
in the good times. Are they still bringing you natural search traffic?
Has your natural search rank for these keywords fallen over time?
If these keywords aren’t still working
for you on the natural search front, get busy with some SEO activities.
Conduct some on-page and link building around those keywords that used
to bring in the converting traffic.
3. Are you receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions on Google AdWords?
If you’ve lowered your budget, raised
your bids or have been busy adding keywords to your campaign, you may
not be receiving 100 percent of your available ad impressions.
Look at your campaign inside of AdWords
and if it says “Limited by Budget†in the campaign status column, you
are not currently receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions.
Review your keyword list to make sure
that the keywords that were bringing you conversions previously are
getting 100 percent of available ad impressions. To ensure this you
might need to pause keywords that have not been performing and lower
bids for keywords that are not the true work horses. If you have a
large volume of keywords, but only a tiny budget you may need to do a
lot of trimming here to ensure the performing keywords get their full
exposure.
4. Has your ad position changed?
Different ad positions perform
differently. Which ad position is best? Well, that depends on many
factors. But, if you were getting conversions, you can start to hone in
on the ad positions that were working for you. Go back to the time
during which those conversions were coming in and review the ad
positions for those top-performing keywords. Compare this against the
positions you are currently attaining. Have things changed? If so,
modify your bids (this may mean switching from automated bidding to
manual bidding) so that your ads for these keywords start to appear in
positions that bring you results.
5. Has your offer changed?
Did you have an offer in your ad copy or
landing page that changed? Has pricing increased or has an incentive
expired? Go back to when those conversions were coming in and review
the offers in your ad copy and on your landing page. If previous
pricing or an expired offer was bringing you results, consider
re-enabling that offer.
6. Is it the season?
Many businesses go through seasonal
changes, but when the slow season comes around, they often forget that
it happens every year. Go back through your analytics and your lead
tracking and check to see if this same thing happens every year around
the same time. If so, think about ways to motivate leads during the
slow times – you might need to whip up some special attractive offers
to help increase your conversion volume during these times.
7. Has your competition changed?
Check out your natural search and paid
search competition for those top-performing keywords which were
bringing in conversions. See any new faces on the block? Get to know
the new faces and make sure you are highlighting your unique
capabilities and offers as compared to them.
8. Has your competition changed their offer?
Look at the ad copy, landing page and
website offers for your natural search and paid search competitors?
Where do you stand? Are they offering more? Have they lowered their
prices? Have they won awards? Have they added guarantees?
Review their offers and see what you have to offer that makes your business unique and a competitive winner.
9. Has your competition upgraded their landing pages?
This always seems to hit in waves. While
reviewing your competition, check out their paid search landing pages
and websites. Have some of them gone through website re-designs
recently and raised the bar? Have they added new features to their
sites such as reviews, testimonials, blogs, forums, photos, or social
feeds?
If their websites are looking more
professional, understandable, engaging, convincing or iterative than
yours, it’s likely influencing your visitor’s impression of your
company. Consider updating your website so you don’t lose out on sales
due to this initial impression.
10. Has there been a lack of reviews or negative reviews on your business?
What have customers been saying about
you online lately? Check out Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local,
Yelp, City Search and any other applicable sites, which let people
review your business online. Are there negative reviews that have come
up recently? If so, reach out and take some steps to address them. Let
people know that you care and inform them of the actions you are taking
to improve.
Or, perhaps you don’t have any reviews
but your competition does. In the online world of selecting services,
reviews hold a lot of weight. If you don’t have many (or any) reviews,
but your competitors do, many people will favor the business with
positive reviews. Think about offering incentives to previous happy
customers to get them to vocalize their great experiences on these
review sites.
11. Has your landing page changed?
Have you changed your landing page
content or layout? Have you increased the data, decreased the data,
modified colors, moved your call to action, or changed your call to
action text? All these things have an impact on user behavior. Try some
a/b testing with the two landing pages (the old one and the new one) so
you can see which one of them truly performs better. Sometimes the
changes we make to our pages feel like an upgrade to us, but aren’t
perceived that way by visitors.
12. Has your website changed?
Similar to #11 above – if you’ve been
making some changes take a hard look at the things you’ve modified
since your conversion rate plummeted. Think about the things that might
be having the most impact on your visitor behavior and slowly try out
some of the older concepts in your new site to see what content or
layouts have the greatest impact on your conversion rate.
A word of caution: don’t make too many changes at once. Go through this
list in order and stop at the first item that is applicable to your
situation and adjust it – then wait to see what happens. You may only
need to make adjustments in one area, or you may need to make
adjustments in several areas, but it’s important not to make too many
changes at once so you can get to the root cause.
