Traffic Is Up but Sales Aren't: What Should You Check First?

Start by looking at where the extra traffic comes from, before hunting for what's broken on the site. When visits rise and sales don't, the first cause to rule out is a shift in your visitor mix, not a failure.

A site can convert exactly as it did before and still show a lower rate. All it takes is sending it different people.

The benchmark

Calculate your conversion rate source by source, for the period before and the period after. If every source converts as it did before, your site is fine: the share of cold visitors has grown.

An overall rate can drop while every per-source rate stays stable.

The gap between sources is a matter of multiples. On a fashion brand we follow, during a sales month, six in ten visitors from paid search or email reached a product page, versus barely more than one in three from paid social.

At the next step, add to cart, paid social performed half as well as the other two. So a social campaign that doubles its budget pulls the overall rate down mechanically, without a single page changing.

The rule

Check in this order: measurement, traffic mix, offer, then site. Start with what you can verify in ten minutes.

The steps

1. Measurement. A change in how things are counted, a surge of bots, a broken tag? Also check the share of unattributed traffic: at a sports brand, it reached 10% of sessions, and we set a target below 5% before commenting on any mix.
2. The mix. Which source grew, on which device, in which country?
3. Landing pages. Where does this new traffic land, and are those pages built for it?
4. The rest. If every source converts as before, stop there. If not, move on to the offer, then the site, in the order of the guide on falling conversion rates.
5. The calendar. Compare with the same week last year, not the previous week.
6. The line for leadership:

"The site converts as before, source by source. What changed is where people come from."

The trap

More traffic for the same sales isn't necessarily a failure.

If this traffic comes from an awareness campaign, it's doing its job: introducing the brand to people who won't buy today.

The problem starts when you pay for this traffic at the price of traffic that buys.