Traffic on the Creative Kits website has dropped significantly since the end of September 2022. At first, I missed it because I was busy making changes to various aspects of the website. This included making sure that the newsletter subscription form was GDPR compliant, adding more fields to better understand my future readers, correcting the shopping cart option that didn't work, and solving the problem with automatic translation in some areas of the website.
After these changes, I continued to release end-of-year collections, such as the Snowdrops collection, and promoted them on social networks. However, to my surprise, there were no sales. I did some ad promotion on Pinterest during December (I will write a post about that in the near future) and it did bring me a small amount of sales. Having no sales in October and November versus December was clearly linked to the Pinterest ad campaign.
So back to the question: What is happening?
What exactly is going on? Where do I start?
Every month, when your website is set with the Google Analytics snippet, the analytic platform sends you a monthly report on how well you do (or not): it gives you a snapshot of your top performance metrics – number of users, revenues, revenues total amount, e-commerce conversion rate, and number of sessions made through the previous month. The November email had all its markers in red. You could understand that the traffic declined substantially in October. At the same time, arrived in my inbox the recap email from Twitter where numerous tweets were talking about the Google Updates.
Initially, I did not link to the updates. I thought it was only a hiccup.
The December email arrived, and it showed the same thing. It got me worried.
I must admit that my time was running out in 2022. It was difficult for me to balance my other business activities with this activity, so I neglected Creative Kits. I did not do a lot of social media, if none, in October and November. I did not publish new products on a regular basis.
Selling digital products, such as presets and templates, requires time and an understanding of the unique needs and realities of the industry. At first, I underestimated the amount of work involved in creating products, preparing product pages, and creating images and messages on social networks. Besides, I needed to learn how Shopify, the website platform, works, make sure that search engine optimisation was being followed, and keep up to date with new social media platforms and tools. I'm not going to go into the topic of the keywords yet!
Establishing production processes and learn about new creative and marketing trends, requires time and agility. On top, you must include the strengths and weaknesses of your project: there are things that you love to do and things that you don't like to do. This aspect is very important because it can hinder your speed :-)
Christmas break arrived and I started to go on the hunt for an explanation, a justification of the decrease of traffic.
Where to start?
Google Analytics report
You are seeing the Source/Medium report overview from the Universal Google Analytics report (period Sept 25, 2022 to Dec 31, 2022 (Blue) compared to previous period (Orange), the traffic is impacted, indicating a loss of round 30% of traffic and thus impacting conversion rate. Though you are seeing spikes on the graph, it can be explained by my visits on the website (interventions and checking) and the IT people I hired to resolve the numerous issues encountered by the website. There is a way to exclude Google to track your visits on your website but I do not implemented it yet (topic of another blog post ;-).
Anyhow, the difference of traffic is enormous. As said, I rarely worked on Creative Kits in 2022 but I was still doing sales, enough to cover the costs of maintaining the tools (Shopifty website and other apps offering different useful services to the activity). As you can see on the graph, the decrease is strong in the last quarter of the year.
Looking at the graph, I started to question:
- Is there an issue with the website? What would it be?
- Is the website slow?
- How does it show up on Mobile?
- Is the website ergonomie upto scratch?
- Is the website well perceived by Google?
- Is it because of the Google Product Review algorithm?
- Is Shopify a good tool? Can it impact negatively in any way the website ranking?
So many questions fly through my head. I was racking my head and pulling on all my knowledge on SEO. Losing traffic comes from a lack of visibility: Why Creative Kits is not visible anymore (not enough anyhow)?
Join me in the next reading to learn more of the trebulations of Creative Kits. Myself, I have learned so much!
See you in the next blog post.
Bianca
