What Happened??
Uh oh your best performing landing page just stopped... well... performing. Traffic has just taken a nosedive and no traffic means no conversions.
And now your boss is asking you "What happened?"
That is a surprisingly hard question to answer. You can have every analytics tool and paid SEO scanner subscription on the market and still be unable to answer this question. Sometimes the question is unanswerable.
This has always been my least favorite thing about dealing with analytics and digital marketing in general. Sometimes there is no clear reason why things work or don't, or stop working. I don't like not knowing why something is happening.
Below is the system I've worked out to help me narrow down the culprit, if I can!
The Technical Check
I start by doing a technical check.
Did something change on the page with a recent CMS update?
Is there a setting telling Google not to index this page anymore?
Did someone change the content on the page?
Did someone change the html or meta tags?
Maybe your campaign expired?
Example: I once worked with a company that would publish its home page as noindex after every update to it because they forgot to turn it off when replacing the old version. It took me a minute and admin access to their CMS to figure out what they were doing and why the home page wasn't getting any visibility in even the most direct search terms.
The News Check
If the on page and technical SEO are good, then I check for recent updates to algos or some other external, widespread reason.
Following the right folks in SEO/digital marketing spaces will give you these insights, hopefully before they start impacting your online performance.
Example: Anytime Google has changed how it ranks search results, changes to Google Ads/Meta Ads/etc., privacy law updates, etc. etc. in the last 15 years.
The Journey Check
If that's not it, you have to go back to your messaging/creative/content/journey. This can be hardest to pinpoint and takes the most experience to figure out. Here are a few places to start:
Does your form or landing page suck?
Does your ad creative match where folks end up when they click a link?
Maybe the messaging isn't resonating with your target audience on this platform so no one is clicking your ad
Or they are clicking links but the tracking is broken and you can’t attribute it properly
One thing might be broken or all of it is. As you get more experienced you get a lot better at looking at a funnel as a whole and judging why a drop-off happens.
Example: Another company I worked for used what was essentially a 3 page application as the only landing page and lead form for all of its dealer recruitment campaigns. We were spending all of our budget to send people to this page and like 99% just bounced right out. I had to build a whole slide deck to convince channel and sales that we couldn't ask for 3 pages of indepth company info from a casual ad click, especially with no more context on the landing page, and show them how much money we were wasting for every click that didn't turn into a lead.
As you develop your skills and intuition, you will start to know where to look first and the fastest ways of ruling things out.
Other experienced marketers, have I left anything out?
Download this checklist
A quick reference to the above points.
