July 29, 2025
072: Tactic Tuesdays: My Conversion Rate Dropped 50% Overnight
The moment your Amazon conversion rate drops by half is when true brand resilience is tested. In this tactical deep-dive, we examine a real-world crisis where one premium brand watched their conversion rate collapse virtually overnight, triggering a cascade of mounting problems: skyrocketing ad costs, plummeting impression share, and rapidly declining sales across their entire catalog.
For brands heavily dependent on advertising—particularly those with a 60/40 or greater split favoring ad-driven sales over organic—these conversion crises hit especially hard. The downward spiral accelerates as reduced conversion forces bid reductions, leading to fewer impressions, fewer clicks, and ultimately, a severe drop in revenue and profitability.
We walk through the comprehensive troubleshooting process: examining your metrics funnel from impressions through click-through rate to conversion; determining exactly when the drop occurred; analyzing what changes (if any) preceded it; and the challenging reality that sometimes there is no clear "smoking gun" to blame. Amazon's platform complexity means the true cause could be algorithmic changes, competitor actions, or other factors completely invisible to sellers.
Most valuably, we reveal the surprisingly powerful price lever that many premium brands underestimate. Through careful margin analysis, our guest discovered they could reduce prices by 20% while maintaining healthy 30% contribution margins—because when properly calculated, the compounding benefits of improved click-through, conversion, and advertising efficiency often outweigh the perceived margin sacrifice. Learn how referral fee reductions, TACOS improvements, and sales velocity increases can transform what seems like a crisis into an opportunity for brand strengthening.
Whether you're currently facing a conversion crisis or preparing for the inevitable day when one strikes your business, this episode provides both immediate tactical responses and strategic frameworks to not just survive the challenge but emerge stronger on the other side. Have you experienced a sudden conversion drop? We'd love to hear your story and solutions.
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00:00 - Introduction to Conversion Rate Crisis
07:09 - Understanding the Cascade Effect
17:13 - Finding the Conversion Rate Problem
27:45 - Price as a Strategic Lever
36:01 - Testing Solutions and Takeaways
42:24 - Final Advice for Brands
WEBVTT
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Welcome everybody to another Tactics Tuesday for the Brand Fortress HQ podcast.
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Today we're talking about something that is very timely, that we see happen from time to time for brands, where you just have one of those situations where you see a big drop in your conversion rate, and what we want to cover here is what do you do in those scenarios and what does that look like.
00:00:21.553 --> 00:00:32.649
So with that, mike, if you wouldn't mind, I'm going to hand it over to you, and if you give a little bit of background on, maybe you know the issue that you're working with right now and so on and so forth.
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So that's been a little bit of a cascading event that we've been trying to address.
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But in that we ended up end of May, around May 26th-ish somewhere in there, our conversion rate dropped off a cliff and it seemed to be brand-wide, quite frankly, and we obviously it was a huge issue because what ends up happening then?
00:01:06.605 --> 00:01:08.668
Anybody who's listening knows this.
00:01:08.668 --> 00:01:14.188
But you know, conversion rate has a snowball effect, right, same as click-through rate has a snowball effect.
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That you know.
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There's this cascading, you know set of issues.
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So our conversion rate dropped by like half, like half.
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And when that happens, you know, first of all your ad costs begin to skyrocket because obviously your ad costs are based very much around what is your conversion rate?
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You know, if I send 10 clicks to my, to my page, and my conversion rate was 20%, I'd normally get two sales and now it's one, you know it's 10%, I only get one sale.
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Obviously the expense versus the revenue and profit generated on the backside is becomes very lopsided.
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But then, worse than that, that snowballs more because you know if the cost goes up too much then it becomes not profitable and so then you have to pull back on your bids because you can't spend as much, you know, per click, and so then you're getting less impressions, and so now you're getting fewer sales overall, and so revenue, everything just cascades in a downward spiral, and so that's kind of what we were seeing In fact, that's actually how we noticed it initially was that we started seeing our ad costs go up and our impression share started going down, and we found out from our agency that they were pulling back on bids and ads because the cost was climbing so fast, and it turned out it was because of this conversion rate problem, and so then it was OK.
00:02:31.344 --> 00:02:32.408
You know, what do we do?
00:02:32.408 --> 00:02:38.069
You know like we need to find the problem, we need to figure out where we're leaking so that we can fix it.
00:02:38.939 --> 00:02:47.334
And another thing that I think is critical to point out here is for us right now, this is a massively big issue.
00:02:47.334 --> 00:03:07.354
It would be a big issue for any brand, but for us it becomes even more significant because at the moment, because we're so high priced in the category and we've had some trouble regaining some rankings that we used to have because of a lot of low price competitors, we are very lopsided in terms of our organic versus ad share for revenue.
00:03:07.354 --> 00:03:13.151
So we're probably 60-40 ads to organic, maybe even 65-35.
00:03:13.151 --> 00:03:14.653
This is maybe even a little closer.
00:03:15.240 --> 00:03:36.792
And so when you're in that situation and conversion rate drops because you have to start pulling back on ads, that is the bulk of our sales and so that's a really significant problem, whereas if you're organic based, you know, like if we were 60, 40 organic ads or 70, 30 organic ads yes, conversion rates a problem.
00:03:36.792 --> 00:03:44.347
Revenue is still going to go down, but you don't necessarily have to pull way back on ads and it's not going to drop as precipitously as it is for us.
00:03:44.347 --> 00:04:01.376
You still need to find the problem, you still need to fix it, but it's just it compounds that much faster in a situation like what we're in, and so it is one reason why, as a brand, I do recommend that you really pay attention to that split in terms of your ad versus organic sales.
00:04:01.376 --> 00:04:06.861
And if you start pushing past 50-50, you probably have a problem, and that's kind of where we are.
00:04:06.861 --> 00:04:13.241
But you really want to be 60-40 organic to ads, maybe even 70-30 if you pull it off.
00:04:15.467 --> 00:04:19.379
Yeah, a couple of things that I think about, just to take a step back.
00:04:19.379 --> 00:04:29.505
That I think is important is the first thing is that thinking about this from inputs and outputs is and this is typically what happens is you start seeing your sales drop.
00:04:29.505 --> 00:04:32.867
And then I think you guys took a great first step in looking at what are.
00:04:32.867 --> 00:04:34.870
When I think about this, what are the about?
00:04:34.870 --> 00:04:39.112
So the first one is checking your impressions just to say, hey, you know, are we just getting less sales?
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Because you know we're getting you know less at bats, where we used to get you know 100,000 impressions a week, now we're only getting you know 50,000.
00:04:55.529 --> 00:04:58.220
And then looking at what your click through rate is.
00:04:58.220 --> 00:05:11.853
And then, finally, looking at what your conversion rate is, because those three metrics are kind of the main three inputs that I think about as far as what's going to lead to the output that we all want, which is more sales.
00:05:13.079 --> 00:05:24.908
And then, when you talk about conversion rate, the other thing that I would just encourage people that, because I feel like this happens to every brand that's been on Amazon long enough that they go through some sort of issue like this, where things kind of feel like they fell off a cliff.
00:05:24.908 --> 00:05:27.894
They they fell off a cliff is when we're talking about conversion rate.
00:05:27.894 --> 00:05:44.750
There's a total conversion rate and then there's also an ad conversion rate, and I think it's important to split those out because we've definitely seen it with some of the clients that we work with on their accounts where, you know, their organic sales pretty much dropped to nothing for a week, but their ad sales were still super strong.
00:05:44.750 --> 00:05:56.302
And so understanding, you know, is it my ads just didn't do the job that they were supposed to, or is there something on the organic side?
00:05:56.322 --> 00:05:57.103
that's not performing like it should be.
00:05:57.103 --> 00:06:12.800
Yeah, I think what's important with everything that both of you have talked about is and this is a conversation that we've had a lot of times and it's about knowing your numbers and, I think, being able to view all of that data in funnel form in the way of a funnel.
00:06:12.800 --> 00:06:29.026
So start with impressions and work your way all the way down to conversions, and if you look at every one of those stats along the way it's nine times out of 10, 9.5 times out of 10, the issue will will show itself as you start walking through that.
00:06:29.026 --> 00:06:36.968
It's either, like John said, it's either an impressions, it's either traffic or conversions, and there's traffic, click through or conversions, and those are really the main three things that it is.
00:06:36.968 --> 00:06:39.189
And if you look at all of that data, I have a spreadsheet.
00:06:39.189 --> 00:06:50.610
It's not very sexy, it's just a spreadsheet with a whole bunch of numbers on it, but it starts at impressions and then it goes to page views and then it goes all the way to conversions.
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And I look at every single step along the way and a lot.
00:06:52.014 --> 00:07:05.069
Most of the time you're able to diagnose what the issue is, and I mean, it's not always when we're talking about conversion, the first thing that comes to people's minds is images and your title and pricing and that kind of stuff, which obviously all that stuff is very important, but it's not always.
00:07:05.430 --> 00:07:12.887
I think a big part of that for as we start digging into the issue that Michael is talking about is that you know it could even we.
00:07:12.887 --> 00:07:16.447
We just changed our, we just switched over agencies, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
00:07:16.447 --> 00:07:18.031
So you know, there is a learning.
00:07:18.031 --> 00:07:23.689
No matter how good the agency is, there's a learning phase and there's some restructuring of campaigns that they do.
00:07:23.689 --> 00:07:31.050
So there's going to be some sort of an adjustment up or down on click through and conversion rate, just on how they're targeting in terms of PPC.
00:07:31.050 --> 00:07:34.023
So it's not always your images when you're talking about conversion.
00:07:34.023 --> 00:07:35.548
It's not always your title.
00:07:35.548 --> 00:07:37.115
Price is obviously a big lever.
00:07:37.115 --> 00:07:50.088
But I think being able to have some sort of whether it's a software or a spreadsheet that you use looking at the data in full funnel form, it makes it a lot easier to figure out where the issue is and then how to address it.
00:07:50.427 --> 00:07:51.630
Yeah, I think so.
00:07:51.630 --> 00:07:56.387
One of the things that comes into play here is then okay, so what's the game plan, right?
00:07:56.387 --> 00:07:59.983
So focusing on conversion rate, let's say.
00:07:59.983 --> 00:08:14.605
Then the first step is to evaluate if conversion rate is what dropped, then that isn't necessarily, you know, a result of a change in impressions or click-through rate, although there may be a connection.
00:08:14.605 --> 00:08:26.548
You are going to want to look at click-through and impressions, because if the only thing that really changed, like at that point, like, so first of all you got to go back to the data and figure out when did the change happen?
00:08:26.548 --> 00:08:37.942
Because once you know when the change occurred, then the question becomes okay, well, what other metrics got worse when that conversion rate went down, and how quickly, like were they?
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Was it simultaneous, you know?
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Did one precede conversion rate?
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Did something else, you know, come after conversion rate?
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What was the sequence of the cascade?
00:08:47.205 --> 00:09:00.461
Because maybe conversion rate isn't the starting point, maybe conversion rate happens somewhere in the middle of this cascading series of events and you and you just kind of work your way back to find the one that was the beginning of that cascade.
00:09:00.461 --> 00:09:04.756
But let's say conversion rate was the initial part of the cascade.
00:09:05.177 --> 00:09:06.341
Then the question becomes okay.
00:09:06.341 --> 00:09:12.322
So you know my impression share didn't was hadn't immediately come down or wasn't coming down before that.
00:09:12.322 --> 00:09:14.408
So that doesn't seem to be related.
00:09:14.408 --> 00:09:16.172
My click through is also fine.
00:09:16.172 --> 00:09:17.322
It hasn't changed at all.
00:09:17.322 --> 00:09:22.601
But one of the things that that tells you more than likely it's not an absolute.
00:09:22.601 --> 00:09:31.412
But for conversion rate, your images matter, your listing copy matters, your A-plus content does matter, your pricing obviously matters.
00:09:31.412 --> 00:09:36.341
But then the question is okay, well, some of those things affect other things, for instance click-through rate.
00:09:36.341 --> 00:09:39.871
Your click-through rate is very much tied to your main image and your title.
00:09:39.871 --> 00:09:56.412
Conversion rate also is fairly relevant from a main image and title standpoint, because if somebody clicks on your main image and they think they're getting something that it turns out your listing seems to indicate they're not getting, then they're not, they're not going to buy.
00:09:56.412 --> 00:09:57.846
So conversion rate goes down.
00:09:57.846 --> 00:10:08.788
So the question is did you do something on your listing that caused a disconnect between the main image that they clicked on and the image which is telling them what they're going to get when they actually spend the money?
00:10:08.788 --> 00:10:12.769
Right, is there a disconnect there, or did you change something in the main image?
00:10:12.769 --> 00:10:19.542
So, in other words, let's put it this way If you knew what your numbers were coming in and you see, oh, my conversion rate dropped.
00:10:19.542 --> 00:10:21.024
But then you look back again.
00:10:21.024 --> 00:10:22.528
This goes back to what I was saying a second ago.
00:10:22.528 --> 00:10:25.354
You go back and you look at OK, click through precedes that.
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What happened to my click through rate?
00:10:26.682 --> 00:10:30.552
Well, my click through rate jumped previous to my conversion rate coming down.
00:10:30.552 --> 00:10:36.447
Right, and maybe they were fairly synonymous, but the point was I've got click through rate going up and conversion rate going down.
00:10:36.447 --> 00:10:49.067
A logical extension of that is I changed my main image and it caused a whole bunch of people to click on my listing who aren't a good fit for what my listing says.
00:10:49.106 --> 00:10:50.870
The product is right.
00:10:51.331 --> 00:10:57.032
Those kinds of mental gymnastics are the things that you need to run through to figure out where was the problem.
00:10:57.840 --> 00:11:08.385
And realistically, I mean just to get to the heart of this Matt and I have gone through all of the mental gymnastics that we can come up with, as well as the agency that we work with.
00:11:08.385 --> 00:11:10.230
We've not found the actual cover.
00:11:10.230 --> 00:11:17.421
So I mean, I'm speaking of all these things and they're all important things that you need to pay attention to and you need to walk through that process, and there's some other things we should talk about too.
00:11:17.421 --> 00:11:23.792
But it's also important to recognize you might not find the problem like the actual problem.
00:11:23.792 --> 00:11:24.933
You may not be able to pinpoint it.
00:11:24.933 --> 00:11:32.130
It might be something Amazon did that you're never going to see, you're never going to know, and who knows, maybe next week they change it back and all of a sudden things are rosy again.
00:11:32.130 --> 00:11:36.530
Could be something a competitor did that you can't see and you don't find.
00:11:36.530 --> 00:11:39.864
So, at the end of the day, recognize you need to look for it.
00:11:39.864 --> 00:11:42.489
You definitely need to dig into the data and see if you can find it.
00:11:43.149 --> 00:12:01.846
But if it becomes fairly clear that you're not going to find it quickly, then you need to find another solution Because, realistically, although the problem is conversion rate, the real problem is that means less money coming into your pocket, right, cash flow is going to decline, profits decline, you know, like that's the end point that becomes the actual issue, right?
00:12:01.846 --> 00:12:06.971
So you need to find another solution that's going to address that end pain point.
00:12:06.971 --> 00:12:09.255
And that's where we are in this process.
00:12:09.255 --> 00:12:15.131
We didn't find the actual problem that caused that precipitous decline, so we're having to find a different solution.
00:12:15.131 --> 00:12:20.251
So at least we can solve the problem of revenues down, profits are down, cash flow is down.
00:12:20.251 --> 00:12:23.208
We're screwed if we don't figure what the solution is.
00:12:24.961 --> 00:12:39.308
Yeah, I think that's such a good point is that sometimes you know as much as we'd love to find you know that that one thing, that was the problem, that if we just, you know, flip that switch again, everything will go back to you know being hunky dory and rosy again.
00:12:39.308 --> 00:12:47.702
The reality of it is is that sometimes they're just you know, sometimes there are those simple fixes and sometimes there just aren't those switches to flip.
00:12:47.702 --> 00:13:01.068
So you have to find, like you said, mike, another way in order to win, and sometimes that means putting in significantly more time to make up for the sales velocity that you lost and the momentum.
00:13:02.552 --> 00:13:07.303
Well, I mean, sometimes it's not a lever that you can pull, and I think that's what Mike was alluding to.
00:13:07.443 --> 00:13:07.764
Is that?
00:13:07.884 --> 00:13:15.964
I mean, sometimes it's Amazon, Sometimes you get unindexed from all of your keywords, Sometimes you are placed in a separate subcategory, a different subcategory than you were Like.
00:13:15.984 --> 00:13:21.201
Sometimes it's something that Amazon did that, like Mike said, is not easy to, and that's the.
00:13:21.201 --> 00:13:53.509
That's the challenge that we run into as sellers on this platform is that there's not always a smoking gun and you can spend your days chasing smoking guns, which is what Mike and I have been doing the last couple of days to be prepared for that as a seller on the platform, and you know, I think, that our skills combined and the knowledge of the platform combined, it's going to end up leading to a solution.
00:13:53.509 --> 00:13:55.982
It's going to end up, you know, we're going to get back to where we were.
00:13:55.982 --> 00:13:58.249
Who knows if we'll ever find the smoking gun?
00:13:58.249 --> 00:14:10.312
But I think you know, knowing your numbers, understanding how to find the data and how to look at the data and how to let the data tell you the story, but then also keeping in mind that there's not always going to be a smoking gun with an easy lever that you can pull.
00:14:10.312 --> 00:14:12.668
I think those are super important things to keep in mind.
00:14:13.059 --> 00:14:28.503
Well, I think too, you know it's reasonable to say that if you're not tracking the changes that you make, then it really makes it difficult to go back and pinpoint what the change was.
00:14:28.503 --> 00:14:42.462
You know, if it's something that you actually did that caused this, you know precipitous decline and click-through rate or conversion rate or whatever it is you might be able to go back to the data and you might be able to pinpoint oh hey, it was.
00:14:42.462 --> 00:14:44.048
You know it's clicked through.
00:14:44.048 --> 00:14:49.951
That's the problem, and it happened on this date, and we're pretty sure it's related to either the title or the image.
00:14:49.951 --> 00:14:50.419
You know whatever.
00:14:50.419 --> 00:15:08.969
But if you have, say, numerous people on your team that maybe do you know listing updates or image updates, or you know things of that nature, and you are not adequately tracking who does what, when and why they did it, then that becomes an additional problem.
00:15:08.969 --> 00:15:21.506
And so and I'll fess up to the fact that we weren't tracking well enough you know what things were happening, who was doing it, when did it happen and why did they do it.
00:15:21.506 --> 00:15:30.373
And so I literally have created a spreadsheet that we didn't have before, that its only purpose is on a SKU basis or ASIN basis.
00:15:30.373 --> 00:15:31.695
You know it has.
00:15:32.140 --> 00:15:34.667
You know you check a box to say what did you change?
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Main image, one of the secondary images, which one?
00:15:37.740 --> 00:15:41.548
You know title bullets, description, price.
00:15:41.548 --> 00:15:45.563
You know all the number of things that you could change related to a product detail page.
00:15:45.563 --> 00:15:54.049
It automatically enters the date and the time of the change and then we're entering in okay, why did we make this change?
00:15:54.270 --> 00:15:55.556
What were we trying to improve?
00:15:55.556 --> 00:15:58.147
Were we trying to improve click-through or conversion or whatever?
00:15:58.147 --> 00:15:59.071
What was it?
00:15:59.071 --> 00:16:01.841
If we change the image, what did we change about the image?
00:16:01.841 --> 00:16:19.971
And then I actually have a link because, because we've started doing a lot of our design work actually in Canva I have a link to the actual page within our Canva document that has all of the main stack of images for the product and it links directly to a particular page that is this design element.
00:16:19.971 --> 00:16:22.629
So it has what was the previous and what is the new.
00:16:23.360 --> 00:16:27.505
And then there's a results tab and so now going forward.
00:16:27.505 --> 00:16:31.443
It doesn't help us with this problem that we just ran into, but at least going forward.
00:16:31.443 --> 00:16:46.120
If we see a precipitous drop on you know June 15th well, I can go back to this spreadsheet, look at the dates, find out what changed on June 15th or 14th or whatever, and I can see oh well, we did this, or at least these are the things that we did.
00:16:46.120 --> 00:16:49.370
Would any of those things you know have affected us in that way?
00:16:49.370 --> 00:16:53.089
If not, well then it probably wasn't something that we did related to the product detail page.
00:16:53.089 --> 00:16:58.241
So it gives you a lot more visibility that you don't have, and Amazon doesn't track that Like you don't have a history.
00:16:58.581 --> 00:17:02.870
you know who did what when on Amazon to know when did those changes occur.
00:17:02.870 --> 00:17:16.924
So I think, if you're not tracking those things, I would create a spreadsheet and an SOP to make sure that whoever on your team is making changes like that, that it's being logged on that sheet so that you can tie the data together with the actions that have happened on your account.
00:17:17.286 --> 00:17:20.865
Yeah, and depending on what software you're using for ads management or other things.
00:17:20.865 --> 00:17:24.712
Some of those softwares do have some of that capability as well.
00:17:24.712 --> 00:17:31.664
The only ones that I've seen it on are fairly expensive.
00:17:31.664 --> 00:17:44.567
So that might be something that, if you're working with an agency that they have otherwise as a brand owner, those things do, you know that software can be kind of expensive, and so I think, like you said, Mike, having something sometimes, you know, having a Google sheet is much better than having nothing.
00:17:45.015 --> 00:17:53.922
Yeah, the other thing that I would say is is that you know very big on, you know analyzing data in order to kind of figure these things out.
00:17:54.002 --> 00:18:17.795
That said, I think it's important for Amazon specifically to make sure that when you're looking at the data, that you're looking at search query performance data, differently from what you're looking at from, like, your ads data and that type of stuff, because those things are, you know, calculated differently, and I'm not, you know, going to go into all the details on that, because I don't think it's really necessary.
00:18:17.914 --> 00:18:30.048
I think you know people can find plenty of material out there on how those things are calculated, how they're calculated differently, but I think it's just important to know that those numbers, how they get to that total is different.
00:18:30.048 --> 00:18:44.886
So just to be aware of that, make sure that if you're looking at, hey, what was our data before, what was our impressions, what was our conversion rate, those types of things If you were tracking that on your using search query performance data, that's what you should look at, you know, compare it to.
00:18:44.886 --> 00:18:52.855
Or you know, if you're looking at based on your business reports and your ad you know reports that you use, that data doesn't mean that you can't use.
00:18:52.855 --> 00:18:54.720
You know your search query reports.
00:18:54.720 --> 00:18:56.604
You troubleshoot it because you absolutely should.
00:18:56.663 --> 00:19:11.145
But just make sure that when you're kind of comparing data, that you're comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges in those scenarios, yeah, I think another important stat that you need to be paying attention to in this conversation is in something that Mike mentioned in the beginning.
00:19:11.547 --> 00:19:24.566
You know, when your conversion rate drops, there's a cascade of things that happen bad things that happen, and one of them is your organic rank, and that's one of the easier things, especially with the tools that are out there on the market now, to track your organic rank, like that's.
00:19:24.988 --> 00:19:28.951
That's one of the first things that I checked when we noticed our conversion rate was was organic rankings.
00:19:28.971 --> 00:19:42.694
That was one of the first things that I was concerned about, and you know, your BSR and your ranking, like those, are other stats that I think are important to be paying attention to, because they're those are what are the most affected when your conversion rate drops.
00:19:42.694 --> 00:20:22.746
So you know, I think that's also an important thing to track, and the amount of of sellers that I talked to that aren't tracking organic rank is is pretty astounding Cause I mean for me, in the way that I think about advertising, is advertising is a way to increase my organic rank on the keywords that matter, and if you think about advertising in that way, then you will start to draw that connection with how advertising affects your organic rank, but then also how conversion rate affects your organic rank, and when you see a drop in your conversion rate, you're almost assuredly going to also see a drop in your organic rank, which then has, you know, amplifying effects on on the rest of the things, like advertising, for example.
00:20:23.776 --> 00:20:36.942
Well, yeah, and I think it's a little bit of a tangent, but I think you know, personally, I think organic rank is a little bit of a misnomer in the sense of I think at this point, it's pretty much it's more accurate to call it earned rank.
00:20:36.942 --> 00:20:51.894
Really, what you're doing is is that you're, you know you're spending money on ads and you're, you know, making sure you're building up your listings and those types of things in order for amazon to give you more visibility, to prove to them that they're going to make more money off of showing your product ahead of your competitors.
00:20:51.894 --> 00:20:58.788
And I think at this point in the game, you know, in 2025, you you really have to earn that spot, doesn't, you know?
00:20:58.788 --> 00:21:00.896
Come to you, you know, for free.
00:21:00.896 --> 00:21:04.836
At least, that's what I see with the vast majority of the clients that we work with.
00:21:06.500 --> 00:21:27.009
Also, I'd say something, and I don't know if this is, you know, true in your case, but when we do see this, one of the things that I would encourage people to check right away is to look at, you know, if you've been running any sort of promotion and you're used to, especially if you're tracking this, you know, week over week or something like that, and that promotion ends or you lose something like strike through pricing.
00:21:27.009 --> 00:21:39.263
It could be that you didn't change anything on your listing or didn't change anything about your ads, but with that change in kind of perception and pricing and badging, that can have a pretty significant effect on your conversion rate.
00:21:39.263 --> 00:21:43.579
And so you know you might be driving yourself crazy to figure out, hey, what did we do differently?
00:21:43.579 --> 00:21:48.685
And the reality of it is is just you just lost price through striking or strike through pricing on your listing.
00:21:48.705 --> 00:21:50.694
You know, that's a really good point, john.
00:21:50.694 --> 00:21:53.118
To be honest, I hadn't actually looked at that.
00:21:53.118 --> 00:21:58.247
I see that most of our hero SKUs, I believe, still have our strike through pricing.
00:21:58.247 --> 00:22:06.836
So that may not be it, but that is a valuable piece.
00:22:06.836 --> 00:22:13.800
That hadn't really occurred to me Because we know I mean it's obvious that strikethrough pricing does have an effect on conversion rate, and so if you lost that, that would definitely be relevant, I think.
00:22:13.840 --> 00:22:24.438
A couple other things to pay attention to here, and then I think I actually kind of want to change gears just a little bit, because I think the last half of this conversation might be better served down a slightly different road.
00:22:24.438 --> 00:22:26.021
We'll see if you guys agree on that.
00:22:26.021 --> 00:22:47.961
But one thing is one of the things that we did fairly early on here was I ran a pick food test just on our landing page, on our PDP, because you know, one of the things that you know you just don't know is if you made a change, if there wasn't any change to your product detail page, and you know for certain that that's true.
00:22:47.961 --> 00:22:53.981
Maybe this isn't a valuable piece, but I would say it's a valuable piece regardless, because it's always good to get feedback.
00:22:53.981 --> 00:23:01.545
Pickfu has one of their testing is just straight up, go to this page and tell me what you thought about it.
00:23:01.545 --> 00:23:03.347
You know like, would you buy this product?
00:23:03.347 --> 00:23:05.230
If not, why not?
00:23:05.230 --> 00:23:08.263
If so, why so?
00:23:08.263 --> 00:23:23.432
And so I sent out a PickFu on it and just sent them directly to you know some of our pages to find out what you know.
00:23:23.362 --> 00:23:25.329
Did anybody say, hey, you know I hated this, or this didn't make sense, or this didn't line up, or you know?
00:23:25.329 --> 00:23:26.415
Did anybody say, hey, you know I, I, I hated this, or this didn't make sense, or this didn't line up, or you know it looked fake, you know, or whatever?
00:23:26.415 --> 00:23:26.565
That didn't happen.
00:23:26.565 --> 00:23:27.866
You know like we got the results back.
00:23:27.866 --> 00:23:30.569
Most everybody said, hey, I would buy that.
00:23:30.569 --> 00:23:34.039
You know which, by the way, slight tangent here I did.
00:23:34.039 --> 00:23:40.088
I did determine that when you run a picture test, you can actually include an attribution link.
00:23:42.275 --> 00:23:47.357
You can use an Amazon attribution link it goes further, it goes further.
00:23:47.377 --> 00:23:58.124
If you use Switchy, which we use to create short links, you can put your attribution link into Switchy, create a short link out of it, feed that into PickFu and you can pixel them.
00:23:58.124 --> 00:24:02.125
So you can pixel people who actually click the link to go to your listing.
00:24:02.125 --> 00:24:06.749
You can attribute them so that if they actually buy, you get back the referral bonus.
00:24:06.749 --> 00:24:11.971
So you might even be able to get some sales out of it and make back your PickFu fees.
00:24:11.971 --> 00:24:13.653
So but anyways, we sent that out.
00:24:13.653 --> 00:24:17.701
A whole bunch of people said no, I would buy it.
00:24:17.701 --> 00:24:21.367
Very few people said no and the people who said no, it wasn't really any major thing with the listing that we could really fix.
00:24:21.367 --> 00:24:23.871
So it became fairly clear that wasn't the problem.
00:24:23.871 --> 00:24:27.537
But I would recommend that I think it's a great idea Consult with other sellers.
00:24:28.199 --> 00:24:41.307
If you're not a part of some chat groups on WhatsApp or some pay for groups that maybe you can be a part of some small masterminds, things like that, where you're you know you know shoulder to shoulder with other sellers at and above.
00:24:41.886 --> 00:24:44.836
You know some below two, so you can actually help other people.
00:24:44.836 --> 00:24:53.791
But there need to be some sellers in there who are at least at or above your level of play on the platform so that you can consult with them and see you know what's up.
00:24:53.791 --> 00:25:03.320
Consult with Chad, gpt or some other AI quad or something and ask it questions, see if it can find the problem, put your data in there and have it analyze the data.
00:25:03.320 --> 00:25:29.522
Then the question becomes how adept are you at figuring out other ways to make an end run around whatever this problem is, so you can get your revenue and profits back up again?
00:25:29.522 --> 00:25:32.295
What are the levers that you can pull and how can you pull them?
00:25:32.295 --> 00:25:43.731
And so I think it would be really useful to kind of focus on some of those strategies and maybe what we're doing right now to get around this problem, because we're there Before we dive into that.
00:25:44.473 --> 00:25:54.915
Would you be willing to spend a couple minutes on just maybe you know, at a high level, walking us through some of the things that you know you and the agency you work with and your team have done to try and troubleshoot this?
00:25:54.915 --> 00:26:08.022
Because, while it may not be the answer for you, I think for our listeners out there, something may ring in their head and go oh, that's something that is the issue for me, in order to resolve the problem when they run into it.
00:26:09.065 --> 00:26:10.355
Well, I would say a couple of things.
00:26:10.355 --> 00:26:28.778
One is, let's just, we'll stay focused on conversion rate at the moment and you can extrapolate to other areas as you need, as as you need, but on the conversion rate side, we know we know the specific parameters that we have control over that will affect conversion rate.
00:26:28.778 --> 00:26:36.045
So if you can't find the ultimate problem, the question is I still have to get my conversion rate back up Like I?
00:26:36.045 --> 00:26:36.164
Can't.
00:26:36.164 --> 00:26:37.911
There's no way I can continue like this with the conversion rate being where it is.
00:26:37.911 --> 00:26:38.090
Can't.
00:26:38.090 --> 00:26:40.638
There's no way I can continue like this with the conversion rate being where it is.
00:26:40.638 --> 00:26:42.063
How do I do that?
00:26:42.063 --> 00:26:43.626
And so what are your levers?
00:26:43.626 --> 00:26:53.461
Your levers are price, which either means changing the regular everyday price or sale pricing or deal pricing or coupons or any combination of those three.
00:26:53.461 --> 00:26:55.875
So pricing is an optional lever that you can pull.
00:26:55.875 --> 00:26:58.038
We'll come back to that in a second, but it's there.
00:26:59.181 --> 00:27:19.843
Your image stack, you know that and in fact, your main image is, I would say, in a lot of ways, your main image and probably your second image are the ones that are the most critical ones, because, one, changing your main image and again paying attention to the connection between the main image and the listing right.
00:27:19.843 --> 00:27:29.282
Make sure that both of those are speaking to the same avatar, they're speaking the same language, they're promoting the same thing, like there's no disconnect between those two things.
00:27:29.282 --> 00:27:44.715
But adjusting that main image, if it increases your conversion rate, as long as you haven't created some sort of a disconnect, it probably will also increase your click-through rate and so then you have a compounding effect there.
00:27:44.715 --> 00:27:49.667
So I would definitely focus in on that and make sure that you're doing split testing on that.
00:27:49.667 --> 00:27:55.317
You can use PickFu or something like that for quick testing, but then obviously you're going to have to use Amazon Experiments.
00:27:55.317 --> 00:27:56.538
So that would be one.
00:27:56.538 --> 00:27:58.643
Title is another Same as main image.
00:27:58.643 --> 00:28:02.450
You know it affects both click-through and, potentially, conversion, so focus in on it.
00:28:02.450 --> 00:28:08.106
The rest of your listing is relevant, but as you move down the page it becomes less relevant.
00:28:08.694 --> 00:28:14.498
Pay attention to mobile versus desktop, because sometimes you make a change that works really well on desktop.
00:28:14.498 --> 00:28:32.136
But if your product is one that generally sells far more on mobile than desktop and I would say in this day and age most products are that way Make sure you haven't done something that made the experience less useful on mobile, like maybe you changed out some image, and on desktop it's great.
00:28:32.136 --> 00:28:41.542
You know, it's a really good conversion driver, what you did, but it's a little text, heavy or something, and it can't be read on mobile, and so it's not producing For us, though.
00:28:41.542 --> 00:28:45.229
Where we have ended up is on pricing.
00:28:45.229 --> 00:28:54.321
Now, I'm going to issue a caveat here, because I've said this a million times and I still agree with this perspective, and that is don't go to price first.
00:28:54.321 --> 00:29:01.742
Far too many sellers go to price first as the lever that they pull in order to increase click-through or conversion, or whatever it is.
00:29:03.268 --> 00:29:26.196
I think that's problematic, because there's a lot of other levers that you can pull, but I will say this if you're in a situation where you need to pull out of a nosedive really fast unless you really see clearly some specific change that you are convinced is going to have a drastic effect via your main image or your listing or other factors that you can employ.
00:29:26.196 --> 00:29:42.505
Price, literally, is the fastest lever that you can pull and the one that will likely have the most drastic and immediate effect on both click-through and conversion rate, both of which are then going to have an end reflection on profit and revenue.
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