Figuring out why sales drop significantly from one day to another

[SimplyPlastic]

Hi all,

We're running an eCommerce site and are using Moz to track our organic results i primarily we are using the Rank tracker and On page analysis tools.

One strange issue that we experience on our website is sales dropping from one day to the next unexplainably (to us anyway). For example, one day (could be any day of the week or weekend) we'll make £1,000 of sales, the next £200 - the following might be back up to £1,000.

I've tried looking for patterns in traffic, but oddly even on the days when we have poor sales we still tend to have almost as much traffic.

We also use adwords, which account for about 50% of sales - on some of the poor days our spend on adwords is down, on others it's not. If the spend is down I could make a fair assumption that our competitors are playing around with their bids.

I'm interesting in trying to determine why we have such irregular sales patterns. If they dropped 10/20% I could quite easily put it down to any number of factors - even the weather for example, however drops of 80/90% seem strange.

I don't really know where to look for the answers - my first thought was that on the poor days I should check whether our organic rankings had dropped significantly overnight - but the Moz Rank Tracker only updates once per week, so perhaps there is an alternative way someone could suggest?

I'd be really interested to hear from any of you that might have been through similar struggles, or, have some ideas that might help us get to the bottom of the fluctuation in sales.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Kind regards,
Al

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Al,

There are so many possibilities for this, so I will run through a few for you to check / think about.

• Have a look at Positionly for daily SERP updates
• Is it a particular set of products where sales drop, or across the board?
• Add heat mapping to your pages (Crazy Egg) to see how users are interacting with your pages.
• How often are you pages / products updated?
• Have you checked Google Analytics to look for issues?
• Do you integrate with Google Shopping?
• Is most of your traffic PPC or organic?

-Andy

[rjonesx. 0]

1. Do the losses correspond with particular days of the week?
2. Are any of your sales recurring? 
3. Are there similar dips in the # of sales, not just the value of sales?
4. Is there a pattern in the source of lost sales (ie: does organic sales drop or just ppc, or all of the,?)

[EGOL]

When my sales volume was about the same as yours there was a lot of day-to-day volatility.  One big sale could up the daily total.   A few nice sales could up the daily total.   A lack of a big sale or a few nice sales would make the daily total puny.

As your sales volume grows volatility will decline from your high days being 5x the volume of your low days.   Once you get up to £2000 to £3000 your daily volatility will probably drop to about 3x between your high days and low days.   Your sales will never be steady because you have day-of-the-week, season-of-the-year, and surprise spikes and dips driven by outside factors.  You will still have great days to celebrate and slow days that allow your staff to work on other ways to advance your business.

[SimplyPlastic]

Hi all,
Thanks greatly for your input.

Unfortunately the drops seem to have no patterns i.e.:

• It's not a consistent day of the week
• It can happen to Organic, PPC or both
• It can be multiple products

One thing we do notice is that on the days we sell less (in terms of overall value), many of the sales are a lot smaller in value. My thoughts on this were that perhaps we were further down the rankings (either ppc or serps) and by the time the consumer reaches our site they have been through many of our competitors and found that they are more expensive or dont deal with small orders (which is quite true) and therefore they are happy to place their small order with us - does this make any sense?

Thanks again

Al

[MattRoney]

Hi Al!

Just a note on alternate tools to check rankings—you can actually get your rankings whenever you'd like using the Rank Tracker Research tool in Moz Pro.