When your conversion rate plummets

Twelve diagnostic questions to get answers

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.