No online retailer wants to experience a sudden drop in traffic. After all, you rely on visitors to your website to make sales and generate income. And if no one is visiting your site, then you won’t be making sales. Sure, from time to time, you’ll experience surges and lulls in visits; Christmas time for retailers can be extremely busy, while B2B SaaS service providers might find uptake slow towards the end of the financial year while companies wait to renew budgets before investing in new software.
However, a drop in your average traffic can indicate something untoward is going on.
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Your Security Certificate is Out Of Date
If your security certificate is out of date, chances are visitors will be getting a warning before landing on your website, causing many people to turn away. Google displays a warning and intercepts people navigating towards your website if your certificate isn’t up to date. This is because they cannot verify the legitimacy of your website and will warn people of a potential problem. While customers will have the option to heed the warning and carry on anyway or bypass the connection to site not secure message via other means, some will be put off, especially if they need to enter financial information and visit a competitor.
A Google Algorithm Update
Another cause of a drop in traffic can be a Google update. Essentially, the update is designed to stop robots from skewing the search results and keep things fresh so that the top results cannot be obtained inauthentically and only genuine results appear at the top of the rankings. It might be that these Google updates, which are always shrouded in secrecy, don’t favour certain aspects of Your site or have identified something that they disagree with, causing your previous ranking to drop and your site not to be shown to those searching for what you do.
Your Ad Campaign Failed
If you have an ad campaign running, it might have expired or been blocked for some reason, meaning you’re no longer showing up in search results despite having a campaign running.
If it’s a new campaign, it could be an error in inputting information and sending out your ads to the wrong target group, or it failed to publish. If the campaign is running, a failure could be due to an expired credit card being blocked for some reason. It’s worth popping into your account to see if this is the cause and rectify any issues if so.
New Competition
E-commerce is constantly changing, and there is always someone new on the block ready to intercept your customers and boost their own profile. If you are experiencing a drop in traffic, it is worth checking if a new competitor is on the block or if an existing one has changed tactics and is currently beating you in the rankings when it previously wasn’t. It might be a new SEO campaign kicking in, a paid promotion, offers, or a viral social media campaign that is attracting your visitors to them. If so, you need to rethink your tactic to play them at their own game and win back your customers.
There are many reasons why you might be experiencing a drop in visitors to your e-commerce site. These four are just some of the more common ones you need to keep an eye out for.