Ben_Graham - 3:00 pm on Aug 29, 2006 (gmt 0)

hellraiser1:

You are experiencing a decline in conversion rate, which can be terrible. No one likes to see their CR drop, even when traffic and overall sales are growing. To solve this problem you must figure out the sequence of events.

If you made no changes to the site, but started getting traffic from a new source (search engine organics) and your overall CR declines, that would indicate that the new traffic is lower quality. Why would this be? Well, your new traffic could be less focused. This can happen if you unintentionally rank on a term with good volume that is unrelated to your business.

If you are now getting unqualified traffic, it's not the end of the world. It means you haven't screwed anything up, and since the traffic is free any CR greater than 0 is money in the bank. There are other problems to be more worried about.

If you made changes which then drove in the new traffic (redesigns to generate more traffic, for instance) and your CR drops it could indicate that you made a negative change. This is fine, if you know what the change is. That's why it's best to make changes one at a time, so that you can accurately measure the results.

To diagnose the problem, you need to find out if the old traffic is still converting at the old CR, or if the CR has declined on all your traffic. To do this, you need a proper analytics package. I'm not familiar with Google Analytics / Urchin, but free is free. If you can't afford a reliable commercial application, or you trust Google, then go for it. Any analytics package that uses javascript tagging will escape the problem of spiders screwing up your stats.

Once you get an analytics package in place, you're going to have to segment your traffic to separate the new from the old. This can be tough when you have no old data to go back to. You could try a log analysis traffic package to look at your old logs, and try to find a way to analyze it properly. You need to know whether your CR has dropped on the traffic you were getting before you started this process.

If you find that all the CR started to decline on all your traffic at once then you know you broke your site. Don't worry, it happens to everyone. Find what you changed, and revert to the original. If you changed too much at once, and you can't pinpoint the change now, you're simply going to have to change things back one at a time until the problem is solved.