TL;DR: If sales are dropping but website traffic looks fine, how do you work out whether you're attracting the wrong visitors or losing customers somewhere in the buying journey?
Say your ecommerce store is getting roughly the same amount of traffic as last month, but orders are down by 20%.
Marketing starts questioning the campaigns, while the ecommerce team starts checking product pages and checkout. Both are looking for answers, but how do you know where the actual problem is?
I'd first check whether the conversion rate has dropped across all traffic sources or only a few.
For example, paid social might be bringing in more visitors than before, but those visitors aren't buying at the same rate as people coming through organic search or email. Even if each channel's conversion rate hasn't changed, a larger share of lower-converting traffic could pull down the overall conversion rate.
In that case, changing the website might not be the first thing worth doing.
But if the same traffic sources are now converting worse than they did a month ago, there's probably more to investigate.
I'd compare the same channels, landing pages and devices across both periods rather than relying on the overall conversion rate. It might turn out that desktop performance hasn't changed much, while mobile visitors are viewing products but adding fewer items to their carts.
That gives you somewhere more specific to look.
Maybe the product information isn't clear enough on mobile, pricing has changed or a popular product is unavailable. If people are still adding products to their carts but fewer are completing checkout, I'd look at delivery costs, payment options and whether anything has changed in the checkout process.
Session recordings and customer feedback can be useful here, particularly when the numbers show a change but don't explain what's causing it.
I'd also check that GA4 is recording purchases and checkout events properly. A tracking issue can easily make a decline look worse than it actually is.
The tricky situation is when both problems are happening together. You might have a campaign bringing in less relevant visitors while checkout abandonment is also increasing among returning customers.
Reducing advertising spend won't necessarily fix checkout, and changing checkout won't make the campaign audience more relevant.
That's why I'd want to understand which part of the decline comes from changes in traffic quality and which comes from people behaving differently once they're on the website.
For those working in ecommerce or CRO, what's the first thing you check when sales start falling? Have you come across situations where the overall conversion rate looked poor, but individual traffic sources were actually performing normally?
