When you get the email below*, first take deep breaths, you are not the first one and not be the last. In heybooster, we found that 1 out of 10 businesses have experienced a critical conversation rate anomaly.
There are a lot of factors that can make conversion rates low, but one of the worst is driving traffic to the stock-out product and unfortunately the common one.
It is a kind of chicken-egg problem. As the marketing team, you are driving more traffic, and bidding more to get new customers and sales. At the same time, you don't have an unlimited supply of products. While you continue to drive traffic to the particular top category, campaign or product, you may expect the customers to buy as they did before. However most of the time, inventory can’t catch your speed and the users land on these pages and are faced with stock-out or understock products.
How Customers React to Stockouts
You don’t expect your customers to be excited to buy a product from your website, they are not. They don’t care about what you recommend under the out of stock product.
- After searching on Google and visiting your website, when they see the product that's out of stock, they return to Google to search again.
- If you are using Facebook ads that pop up between two funny Instagram stories with a stockout product, it will damage your brand image. And worse, you will have this user in your remarketing list and will have to bid more to catch them since they already have a negative bias toward your brand.
The two cases above damage three of your marketing objectives directly; increasing market share, building brand positioning, and increasing return on investment.
What can you do to detect it before it damages a large portion?
If you have already collected product stock data in your Google Analytics, you should control which products are viewed and how their stocks are on a daily basis. Having stock is not enough, do you have stock for each product size? Moreover, you should check if any products with less stock have increased traffic. Don’t forget to filter specifically product pages, otherwise, you may miss it between campaign, promotion and category pages.
If you don't collect this information, then you should find a way to track the behaviour of the users who have faced stock problems.
Else…
In heybooster, we already automate both analyses above. Heybooster analyzes product pages and ads that you direct to these pages and alerts you if any need your attention.
We are analyzing your Facebook DPA campaigns, Google performance max campaigns and other retargeting campaigns so you don’t waste your money on the products that don’t have a return on investment.
What you need to do is create your account and activate your product performance analysis. A last and quick reminder; to be able to get notified about the low performed products don’t forget to turn on your notifications for product performance insights.
*if you want to receive these anomalies to your email, just connect your Google Analytics account and get critical metrics anomalies.
