
Sep 09 2024
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Why Is My Conversion Rate So Bad? Fix It Now
You are attracting plenty of traffic but your conversion rate is awful. This is a sign that that something isn’t working effectively on-site or your acquisition methods aren’t set up correctly. Here I’ll visit some of the common reasons that your conversion rate is so low and also some
What Exactly Is Your Conversion Rate Anyway?
It is an important website metric that essentially tells you how many of your website visitors turn into paying customers. You’re doing the hard work by attracting the customers so don’t let your strategy and on-site factors affect lower funnel conversion.
How Is It Calculated?
It is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors to your site and multiplying by 100.
As an example – you have 1,000 visits and get 1 sale. That is a 0.1% conversion rate. If 100 of them had bought from the 1,000 visits, that would result in a 1% conversion rate.
Reasons Your Conversion Rate is So Poor
Here is my list of 10 reasons that your metric is performing so badly before you go away and spend money on ecommerce conversion rate optimisation services.
1. You Are Attracting the Wrong Traffic Initially
If most of your online store visitors aren’t converting, you might be attracting the wrong audience from the very outset. While driving traffic is great, if those visitors aren’t interested in your products, they won’t buy. This could come from poor keyword targeting, irrelevant social media campaigns, or non-targeted ads. I explain more about how important ensuring that your ads are optimised in point 2.
Solution:
- Analyse your traffic sources in GA4: Use Google Analytics to identify where your visitors are coming from.
- Check your average session duration: If your average session duration is really short, people aren’t finding what they expected on your site. It shows that they are landing on your site and then exiting it shortly after, normally because it didn’t match their intent or you were out of stock.
- Refine your SEO strategy: Ensure you’re ranking for keywords relevant to your audience. It’s nice to have lots of impressions and clicks to look at from a reporting standpoint but if it’s resulting in people bouncing from your site, it’s a waste of time.
- Reassess your marketing campaigns: Focus on attracting people more likely to convert through tailored content and ads. Ensure that the messaging is clear and the landing pages have the right info on them that the customer expects.
2. Poorly Targeted Ads
PPC can drive tons of traffic, but if those ads aren’t laser-targeted, they might be reaching users who are not interested in your products. This ultimately results in wasted ad spend and low conversion rates often surely follow. You need to check your ads regularly to ensure that they are delivering sales and continually refine them until their conversion rate increases incrementally.
Solution:
- Use detailed targeting: Ensure your ads are aimed at specific demographics, behaviours, and interests of your particular audience.
- Test ad creatives: Continually A/B test your ad copy, visuals, and calls to action (CTAs) to see which ones perform better. Refine those each time and you’ll find soon enough that you have a powerful ad structure. (Ever heard about the NBA coach Pat Riley and his regular 1% gains? It won him an NBA championship!)
3. Your Product Pages Need Optimising
Even if the right visitors are landing on your site, a poorly optimised product page can lead to bounce rates and missed sales. Long-winded descriptions, unclear CTAs, or difficult navigation can all hurt your conversion rate.
Solution:
- Simplify product descriptions: Make them clear, to the point, and write about the benefits
- Optimise for speed: Ensure pages are fast-loading. Slow sites frustrate users and can run into ranking issues if you are not meeting Google’s Page Speed metrics.
- Clear calls to action: Make it easy for visitors to know what to do next (e.g., “Buy Now,” “Add to Bag”).
4. Low-Quality Product Imagery
First impressions really matter in ecommerce. Poor-quality product images can make your products seem cheap, undesirable and make your site look untrustworthy. High-quality visuals that show the product in different contexts and angles are essential for ecommerce success.
Think of a backpack with a laptop sleeve, water holder, multiple zip pockets, clasp around the chest – you need images to represent the features. People haven’t got the luxury of picking up the bag in a store and trying it. You need to sell it with your imagery or you might lose the sale.
Solution:
- Invest in professional product photography: Show your products from multiple angles and offer zoom functionality. Use plain backgrounds like white or grey. If you can’t do it, pay someone to do your ecommerce image editing.
- Use lifestyle images: Help customers visualize the product in use to create a more emotional connection. Have someone wear the item or use the item in its intended place so people can understand how it works or what it’ll look like.
In this example below from High Street stalwart TK Maxx, I think a t-shirt for £99.99 with an RRP of £290.00 should be photographed and displayed in much better quality than this. Additionally it only has a front and back image, without any details. Better imagery would surely enhance their offering

5. Lack of Trust Signals (e.g., Reviews, Security Icons, GMB Profiles, Social Profiles)
Trust is a huge factor in ecommerce conversions. Without reviews or social proof, customers may abandon making a purchase. If your site doesn’t showcase product reviews or show security / payment icons, it might be driving users away.
Similarly claiming your Google Business profiles and having regularly updated profiles that people can reference, all adds to the trust factor.
Solution:
- Add customer reviews: Include a reviews section for each product. Be careful as this can be an issue if you don’t have enough product reviews already. If a product has none or only 1 review and it’s a 1 star, it will definitely put people off purchasing. To counteract this, leave off the product reviews and implement a generic store reviews widget until you’ve built up product reviews in the background.
- Highlight testimonials: Showcase positive feedback from previous buyers or industry experts. Any form of social proof like UGC (user generated content) can really help to make people trust you.
- Use trust badges: Display security and payment logos to make users feel safe when purchasing.
6. Complicated or Poor Checkout Experience
The checkout process should be as smooth as possible. If it’s too complicated, lengthy, or filled with unnecessary steps, users will abandon their cart. This is a major cause of low conversion rates. Platforms like Shopify pretty much lock you into a standard, tried and tested checkout design and process. However other platforms like Magento give you a lot more flexibility and potential for it to go wrong.
Solution:
- Streamline the checkout process: Remove unnecessary form fields and steps. Keep it clear and obvious.
- Enable guest checkout: Don’t force users to create an account to make a purchase. Some people have privacy concerns and prefer not to be a registered user.
- Offer multiple payment methods: Give customers options like credit cards, PayPal, and other region-specific methods.
7. Non-Mobile Optimised Website
With more and more consumers shopping on their mobile devices, a website that isn’t mobile-friendly will almost certainly kill your conversion rate. If users can’t easily browse or make purchases on mobile, they’ll leave and possibly never return. Don’t waste your money on ad acquisition to serve someone a site that doesn’t work on their preferred device.
Solution:
- Responsive design: Ensure your website adjusts seamlessly to mobile and tablet devices. If you do not yet have a responsive site, that is one of a main reasons that your site will not be converting, along with it suffering in the organic rankings because of it.
- Test mobile experience: Regularly check for issues like slow load times, difficult navigation, or problematic checkout flows on mobile.
Mile High Comics are somehow managing to trade with a non-mobile responsive website. The irony is that their headline is “America’s Largest & Friendliest Comics Retailer” – it’s not friendly for the user

8. Lack of Personalisation
Shoppers in today’s world expect personalised experiences if possible. If your site is serving the same content and recommendations to all users, it may not be engaging enough to convert them into customers. However, take this too far and people can have reservations that you’re harvesting too much data from them.
Solution:
- Personalise product recommendations: Use customer behaviour data to recommend relevant products. The arrival of AI into the personalisation industry has helped this advance a lot in recent years.
- Segment your email marketing: Don’t send an email blast to all of your subscribers. Tailor email campaigns based on user preferences, past purchases, or browsing history. Implement a way of getting your customers to update their preferences so you learn more about them and segment them from that.
9. Ineffective Promotions or Discounts
Promotions can drive conversions, but if your discounts aren’t compelling, or the process to redeem them is cumbersome, users might give up before buying. Consider implementing on-site messaging and overlays (abandoned browse popups etc) to your page to appeal to your customers before they are about to leave.
Solution:
- Offer compelling promotions: Ensure your discounts provide real value and are competitive enough that a customer will buy once thecy see the offer.
- Simplify the voucher code redemption process: Make it easy for users to apply discounts at checkout / bag stage, and clearly display any terms or conditions. By trying to fool your customers with wording around promotions, you’re going to end up with more customer service enquiries and abandoned baskets.
10. Poor Email Flows
Not utilising automated email flows to their full effectiveness is a huge missed opportunity. With email automations from suppliers like Klaviyo, you can have emails firing out to customers once they’ve left your site, adding value to the original acquisition cost. Their lifetime value as a customer can increase exponentially, thus clawing back your conversion rate gains in subsequent days after the customers have abandoned their session.
Solution:
- Implement Abandoned Basket Campaigns: Have a flow set up to remind the customer of their missed opportunity. Make this a multi-phased approach, with offers potentially increasing in value towards the end of your chosen number of steps.
- Consider Various Automations: Consider flows for different user segments such as abandoned browse, abandoned basket, non-opens (re-engagement campaigns), welcome emails. All can help increase the overall lifetime value of your customer if you get this right.
- Test Emails: Again, the key here is A/B testing. Some emails will work better with specific details such as price either on / off.

Poor Conversion Rate In Review
There’s not a one-stop-shop for fixing your conversion rate when it’s tanking. However those steps above cover a lot of reasons why it will be on the downward curve. Work through each of the points one-by-one and you’ll be sure to see that conversion rate increase in no time at all.
However you are likely to need to keep refining to meet your customers expectations, rather than it be a one time fix.
By addressing these common issues—traffic quality, ad targeting, product page optimisation, checkout experience, and mobile readiness, I believe you’ll be well on your way to improving your conversion rate and boosting your bottom line.
If you would like a free consultation to discuss your ecommerce performance, reach out to me on my contact page and we’ll get the conversation started!