Website conversion ratesuddenly flat-lined? Try

these 10 tips first!

Bugger…. If you’re here then something bad has happened. But not necessarilysomething that is hard to fix. If your website is still getting the same amount of traffic but

your conversion rates have bottomed out throw out the thoughts of buyer behaviour,

seasonality and new competitors and go through these basics first.

1. Broken Links, 404’s

This is so obvious but it has to be here because it has made so many marketing managers

look like idiots. Check the actual urls to see if they are live.

2. Tracking Codes

It might seem obvious but is your tracking working properly? A good way to check this is

to use ‘Tag Assistant by Google’ Chrome extension and work through your conversionfunnel checking each step yourself.

3. IT Problems

Are you just not receiving conversions? Get your team to check their spam folders and

run a sendmail test on your web servers. Ring your own phone numbers and mystery

shop your own call centers. Make sure you do this from a number of devices and use a

variety of email addresses.

4. Malware

Check your webmaster tools notices for malware warnings but still check the site

yourself and do it from multiple regions in multiple browsers – some hacks actually use

user agent referrers to only present malware to visitors from search engines (or even only

AdWords) or only mobile devices making them not as immediately noticeable to site

owners, so enter your site via search engines and click on your own ads and browse your

own site for a few minutes and do this from a number of devices and browsers.

5. SSL certificates

It is very common for business owners to forget to renew their SSL certificate and while

you might not notice yourself some of your users can have a warning appear in their

browser that says ‘unsafe site ahead’ which obviously will put them off converting.

6. Ad Copy Changes or Disapprovals

If you are running multiple ads in your PPC campaigns the advertising networks can

actually decide a particular ad is more profitable for them than another and stop serving

your high converting ad all together. Check any ad that has had a drop in traffic in the

date range that you are seeing a drop in conversions.

7. Organic Landing Page

I have avoided listing causes which might cause a drop in traffic AND conversion rate

but it can be common for Google to change which page of your website is serving for a

particular keyword in your organic rankings. For instance if you have a blog post you

have written on the same topic as a commercial page that somehow gained a lot of

popularity you might find your info page serving in organic listings instead of your

commercial, converting page.

8. Design, Form or Copy Changes

Audit your website change history and pay particular attention to any headlines, banners

or form field changes that may have taken place. Presuming you are looking at a drastic

conversion rate drop then these really are the only elements that could cause it. One of

the most common is the sales team deciding they need to add an obscure required field to

a conversion form without investigating the impact that this might have.

9. Campaign Parameter Change

Presuming roughly equal traffic the key things to check first are campaign settings. Key

things to look for are your geographic settings, traffic sources and device. Did someone

update the Australia setting to Austria? It has happened. Was a key search campaign

turned off? Or did a bid adjustment suddenly use all your budget on mobile?.

10. Get a second opinion

One thing I have learnt from employing and meeting so many online marketers is the

only thing they love more than talking about themselves is proving their expertise on a

problem like this. Get a professional to look over the problem, or get a few professional

to do it.

Can we assist?

If you are struggling with a sudden conversion rate drop please let us know, we would be

more than happy to see how we could assist you.

Do you have any other tips to add? Let me know in the comments below!