Marketing Guide: Investigating a drop in sales or bookings

At Marketing Moments, a common challenge that we often hear is from people is our bookings have slowed down or we are just not selling as much now. So, we have put together a step-by-step guide to investigating this.

Step 1 - Review your website data

Start with the data and see what trends you can find that may explain a decline in sales or give you areas to focus on. Our top tip is that Google Analytics defaults to compare data to the last period (so is week-on-week), whereas ideally you want to compare year-on-year so you can account for seasonal variations.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Has your site overall conversion rate dropped?

  • If so, has it increased or decreased by acquisition channel? What channels are not performing worse? This can help you to identify on what customer journeys to focus on. For example, it could be something simple like using the same imagery and positioning in both email and website to build trust with the customer. What could you do to improve the performance of each channel?

  • If not, has your website traffic decreased? If so dig deeper and identify what channels are driving less traffic to your site and is this what you expected? This should help you to identify focus channels to concentrate on. Why has traffic from these channels dropped? What could you do?

  • If your website traffic hasn’t decreased, move your focus to quality – has your bounce rate increased? Is your time on site poor? Both of these are indicators that you’re not driving quality traffic and to focus on advertising tactics you’re using.

• Has your revenue increased or decreased when compared to the same period last year?

  • If it has decreased what products are struggling year-on-year and why might this be? Are there any external factors that could be impacting selling these products in particular? Is the positioning of this product still fit for purpose?

Step 2 - Prioritise your recommendations

It is really easy to get carried away with your recommendations, but to then spread yourself to thin at trying to execute them. Therefore, we would recommending using something like a 2x2 prioritisation matrix for your ideas.

This is a quick an easy way to identify the ideas that are going to be the most effective. Are you looking to get your teams input? A great tip is to do the prioritisation exercise with them and see what everyone says. You can take it a step further by adding dot voting for the quick wins to see which three you’re going to do first.

Step 3 – Implement recommendations and measure the effectiveness as you go

Slow and steady is a great way to implement these recommendations, as it gives you the opportunity to measure the effectiveness and see what is working and not working? So implement a recommendation, embed, measure the effectiveness, continue or discontinue and then move on to the next recommendation.

Think about the following metric to measure the effectiveness:

- Impact on conversion rate and revenue

- Impact on traffic volume

- Impact on bounce rate or time on site

Make it easier to measure the effectiveness and identify future issues by automating regular reporting using Google Analytic dashboards.

Get in touch if you would like to see how Marketing Moments could help you.