What is an eCommerce Marketing Agency?

An eCommerce marketing agency uses a range of marketing services to create and manage a comprehensive strategy to help your business grow and reach its goals. They are a one-stop shop for eCommerce website development, market research, branding, UX, PPC, SEO and more. The end result is a website that is optimised to grab attention, keep users engaged and drive sales.

Do I Need a Marketing Agency?

A marketing agency can help you grow your business by managing and optimising your marketing efforts. We can create and execute strategies to increase your visibility, attract more customers and enhance your brand’s presence online.

Struggling with scaling up your marketing efforts? Unsure how to elevate your brand online? That’s where the right agency comes in. Imagine no longer having to wear a million hats. Leave the complexities of digital marketing to specialists who can push your business forward.

The Benefits of Working with a Digital Marketing Agency for Your Business

Advantage 1 – All-In-One

You’ve given it a go yourself, but to be an expert across the myriad of specialities needed to bolster your eCommerce website is an overwhelmingly tall order. Trying to master SEO, PPC, content marketing, CRO, UX and more is like trying to be a chef, an accountant and a marine biologist at the same time. Each area comes with its own complexities and ever-evolving knowledge.

With an agency, you get a team of experts across every discipline working towards the singular goal of growing your business. At Brave, we deliver this advantage by offering end-to-end solutions designed to elevate every aspect of your digital presence. With our wealth of collective knowledge, you get the complete package under a single umbrella, eliminating the need to juggle multiple agencies or freelancers. Take a look at the range of services we offer below. Our all-in-one approach ensures that your eCommerce brand isn’t just keeping up with the competition, but pulling ahead.

Integrating Multiple Disciplines

It’s not enough to be proficient in just one aspect of digital marketing. Businesses have to develop a strategy that integrates all marketing channels. Ultimately, all channels (from PPC to UX) are working towards the same goal, and each takes care of different metrics that achieve this goal. So by intermingling, the separate parts work cohesively to enhance your brand’s identity and take customers smoothly through the sales funnel.

You may be tempted to focus on new customer acquisition through quick wins earned through PPC – we know plenty are, as 45.7% of respondents to our eCommerce 202X report said this was their aim. But it’s no use having high traffic to your site if only a small percentage of users actually convert into customers. That’s where the true value of an integrated approach shines through.

We’ve written about how SEO and content marketing go together hand-in-hand to improve both SERPs and user experience, but the same could be said for any combination of these elements. Forbes echoes this, stating that folding in sectors such as SEO, CRO, email marketing and more creates an integrated marketing approach that can, “deliver a consistent, seamless, customer-centric content experience across all channels.”

Advantage 2 – Expertise

An external agency brings a wealth of experience and a fresh perspective to your business. Unlike an in-house team, which may struggle to keep pace with the constant evolution of digital marketing, an agency provides you with a team of dedicated experts who live and breathe their individual fields. While your traditional marketing managers may excel in some areas, digital marketing is a new and increasingly imperative world that requires consistent, ongoing training.

When you hire an agency like Brave Agency, you’re not just tapping into the expertise of one individual, but the collective knowledge and insights of an entire team. This combined experience often totals decades, if not centuries, across various industries, platforms and campaign types. By leveraging this breadth of experience, agencies can identify opportunities and strategy that an in-house team might overlook.

At Brave Agency, you’re not just getting the experience of one SEO expert, but the combined insight of three. That’s three informed perspectives converging to craft a sharper solution for your business, something that an in-house marketing team simply cannot match.

Agency vs AI

Much has been made about how AI tools such as ChatGPT will impact the role of marketing agencies. But as we said when ChatGPT first made a buzz, while AI can be a useful tool for efficiency, it cannot replicate the creativity, strategic thinking and deep contextual understanding that experts bring to the table. Just like Excel or Siri, AI is a tool to streamline tasks, but will never be a full replacement for human ingenuity.

David Drogg, one of the world’s top advertising creatives, captures this sentiment perfectly: “AI, with time, will allow us to make things and operate. But there are times when you need to make connections, you need to be distinctive, you need to stand out. Taste and ridiculous things like that, which are still imperative and exist in the world, are gonna be important.” (Source: The Drum)

Advantage 3 – Free Up Time

Building an internal marketing team requires a long-term investment in recruitment, training, salaries and tools. While hiring an agency may seem like a significant expense initially, it can often be more cost-effective than maintaining a full in-house marketing team.

An agency not only handles the day-to-day tasks but also ensures your marketing efforts are consistently optimised. From tracking performance with the latest analytical tools to adapting your strategy to industry changes, a reliable agency never takes its eye off the ball, letting you to focus on what you do best – running your business.

At Brave, we don’t just keep up, but go Beyond to stay ahead of the competition. Our team is always monitoring potential bumps in the road and preparing accordingly. Even unassuming changes such as the years-long evolution of Google Analytics or paid campaign bidding can have sweeping impacts on the best practices for both platforms. Yet if you aren’t clued in, you won’t even notice it but be stuck wondering why your rankings are dropping or paid media performance is lacking. With Brave, your business won’t be left behind by shifts in technology or consumer behaviour.

Staying Ahead of Industry Trends, Updates and Algorithm Changes

“We launched our eCommerce skincare store way back in 2001. There have been more industry changes in the last two years compared to the entire previous 20 years.”

– David Furst, Skinlight Cosmetics Ltd

Fact is, there’s so much to keep up with that it takes a team in itself to be fully vigilant and receptive to new industry changes, updates and trends. Google frequently updates its algorithm in what is known as a Core Update, which shakes up what Google desires from its content to ensure that it displays the very best experiences for users when searching. If you’re not adjusting your strategy to align with these updates, you risk losing visibility and traffic.

It’s not just us who think this. As part of our eCommerce 202X report, Will Ward, an executive at a leading sports and outdoors company, says: “eCommerce is getting tougher. Staying ahead of trends is key.” Similarly, Amy Hunt, head of a leading DIY and hardware brand, points out: “Content and quality user experience have been at the forefront of most of Google’s recent core updates. It’s important we lean into this to offer a well-rounded, easy experience for users where they feel confident in the product they’re buying and who they’re buying it from.”

Understanding of Platforms like Shopify, WordPress and WooCommerce

At Brave, our ingrained expertise across platforms like Shopify, WordPress and WooCommerce ensures there’s no learning curve – just immediate, impactful results. We’ve detailed how platforms like Shopify allow for visually engaging storefronts with elevated personalisation. However, even the Shopify platform itself recommends using agencies, citing faster results, specialised expertise and cost savings as key benefits.

After two decades of experience in a litany of eCommerce platforms, we’ve come to know them inside and out – enough to break new ground with you. We work with bespoke content management systems, our deep understanding allowing us to uncover untapped opportunities across design, SEO, blog strategy and even micro-level conversion rate optimisation.

Advantage 4 – Scalable and Flexible

Scaling an in-house team takes time. You need to recruit, hire, and train new staff. If you’re handling it yourself, you may find your capacity to manage multiple tasks strained as your business grows. An agency can adapt and grow with your needs, no hiring or training required. As your business evolves, so does our approach – swift, smooth and scalable.

The average wage for a marketing manager is around £40,000, but according to Dalia Courridge, the true cost in their first year is more likely to be £20,000 above this. This is on top of the possibility that the person may not be the right fit or plans change, leaving you with sunk costs in recruitment, training, and potentially a vacancy to fill all over again, which can disrupt operations and delay business goals.

A marketing agency eliminates the need for costly recruitment, training and onboarding processes. At Brave, our team combines their experience across a variety of disciplines and industries in a way that no one individual can, ensuring we understand the unique challenges and opportunities of your business. With our customer experience (CX) focus and our diverse portfolio of clients, we’ve honed the ability to adapt quickly to different market environments. Working with Brave means fewer disruptions and greater peace of mind.

Starting an eCommerce Business vs Elevating It

Anyone can start a business; it takes resilience and know-how to elevate it. As Jan Romme, Director at a leading consultancy firm, states, “Despite an abundance of digital opportunities, channels and tools available, many companies still struggle to drive a profitable and long-term sustainable business”.

At Brave Agency, we review your current marketing strategy and identify which tactics are successful and which methods are proving to be ineffective and expensive. For more insights, take a look at our blog on why reviewing your marketing strategy is important. Kevin Alderson, founder of a consultancy business, adds: “Getting traction as a new entrant in a competitive sector with finite resources is a constant challenge, so strategic planning is the critical component in investing wisely to build long-term, sustainable foundations.” We ensure your business is equipped with the strategies and agility needed to grow.

How to Find a Digital Marketing Agency

The key to finding the right digital marketing agency is to align with a partner who understands your vision, challenges and goals. Start by evaluating their expertise in your industry, reviewing their portfolio and checking client testimonials. Ensure that they prioritise transparency, communication and a data-driven approach.

At Brave, we thrive on challenges and deliver solutions that go beyond the ordinary. We’re ready to lead the charge on revitalising your digital presence. Embrace the bold path to reaching your brand’s full potential and talk to us today to see what opportunities we can find for your business in the digital landscape.

The basics of email open rates

Let’s start simple: the open rate statistic measures the percentage of your audience that opens your emails. It’s similar to click-through rate (CTR) on a paid ad, although the way it’s calculated is quite different (more on that later).

Open rates are important for two reasons. Not only are they a good indicator of how engaging and intriguing your subject lines are, they offer a real insight into how your customers perceive your brand (and the quality of the emails you send out) overall. If you consistently deliver high-quality content to your subscribers’ inboxes, they’re more likely to click on every email – even if the subject line doesn’t immediately grab them. Because they’re addicted to your brand.

• A high email open rate is indicative of loyalty: your subscribers keep coming back for more.
• A low open rate suggests the opposite: subscribers are losing interest in your emails, either because the content is lacking in relevance, or because they’re falling out of love with your brand as a whole.

Why do I have a low email open rate?

There are a whole host of reasons why your open rate might not be where you’d like it to be. To begin addressing the problem, complete a thorough audit of your emails, paying particular attention to the following points:

Are your emails providing value?

Ultimately, if your subscribers aren’t getting enough value from your emails, they’re not going to keep clicking on them. By value, we don’t just mean in a monetary sense; sure, sales are always a good way to draw people in, but they’re not the be-all and end-all. Providing insightful, entertaining or even humorous content is a great way to get your audience back on board with your campaigns.

Are there certain email types causing low open rates?

Try to ascertain whether your open rates are low across the board, or whether there’s a specific type of email that has a lower open rate than others. If that type of email isn’t resonating with your audience, it’s probably time to ditch it (or revamp it).

When did the open rate start to drop?

Has it been a while since you launched a new product or ran a seasonal sale? If your open rates have been sliding downwards for a while, it might be time to shake things up and try a new approach to turn things around.

How to improve email open rates: Best practices to keep in mind

Crafting compelling subject lines

You’re not going to catch fish without any bait on your hook, and in email marketing, your subject line is the bait that draws people (not fish) in. Fish can’t read emails. Anyway, make sure it’s sharp, polished, impactful, and concise: you don’t have a lot of room to play with, so the words you choose need to make an immediate impact.

Optimising sender name and preheader

Your choice of subject line is critical, sure – but don’t neglect your sender name and preheader text either. These little nuggets of content are valuable real estate in any inbox, so use them to your advantage: make sure your sender name reflects your brand and comes across as legitimate and trustworthy, and make sure your preheader creatively complements your subject line.

Strategic list segmentation

If you’ve been firing off generic emails to your entire audience thus far, that might be where you’re going wrong. Take the time to segment your list and create tailored emails for specific audiences, targeting the content to suit their particular needs and interests.

List hygiene and management

Your list might be full of no longer active email addresses or users who lost interest in your brand a long time ago. It’s always a good idea to tidy up your list every once in a while, removing users who no longer engage with your content.

Perfecting your sending timing

There’s no exact science to this, but there is a whole lot of trial and error. Oh, and patience. Try to experiment with different days and times to send your emails out and see how your audience responds.

Optimising for deliverability

If a large proportion of your emails are bouncing back (or not displaying correctly), this could be holding your open rate back significantly. Try to optimise all of your emails so they’re not flagged as spam, ensuring they load quickly and look the part on every device and every email client.

Creating engaging content and enhancing the user experience

As we touched on earlier, emails need to really look the part; well-crafted text is one thing, but you can’t afford to send out bland-looking emails devoid of images or CTAs. Try to spice up your emails while ensuring the user experience is seamless, double-checking the functionality of every link before you hit send.

Monitoring and continuous improvement

No email campaign is ever ‘done’ – they’re all a work in progress. So don’t be disheartened if the stats drop off a little every so often, just keep improving your emails and stick at it. Provided you deliver quality content to people’s inboxes – and keep a close eye on the statistics while you’re at it – you can create campaigns that people look forward to receiving.

Speak to our email marketing experts for support you can count on

Want to make email marketing one of your main conversion-drivers? Why wouldn’t you? At Brave, we’ve been doing just that for eCommerce brands across the UK since 2000 – and your company could be next in line. Discover more about our range of Mailchimp and Klaviyo email marketing services today.

In a nutshell, what is email marketing?

Assuming you’re a regular human with internet access, chances are you already have a pretty good idea of what email marketing is. It’s hard not to notice it.

We’ve all had promotional emails land in our inboxes at some point or another, sometimes flagging a seasonal sale, highlighting a new product or recommending something we might be interested in based on our previous purchase. To the uninitiated, this is what email marketing is.

But it’s actually so much more than that. It isn’t just about promoting products and driving sales: it’s arguably the best way to turn prospective customers into brand loyalists.

Because marketing emails can be personalised and targeted at specific individuals or groups of people, they allow you to speak to those people directly, addressing their specific needs, wants and pain points. They’re the closest your brand can come to having a conversation with its audience, making them feel heard and valued.

A well-run email marketing campaign doesn’t just drive leads and sales – it reinforces your brand’s persona and makes every single customer want to come back for more. And the benefits don’t end there. Retaining existing customers is far cheaper than attracting new ones, and because email marketing is one of the best customer retention tools out there, that also makes it one of the most cost-effective marketing channels around.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

We’ve already touched on some of the positives of email marketing already, but it’s time to take a closer look at what it brings to the table.

It can generate rapid results

Typically, when rapid sales and revenue growth is the number one goal, businesses turn to paid media. And for good reason – search and social ads are perhaps the best way to give your brand a boost when time is of the essence. But email marketing is right up there with them in terms of its ability to generate a timely return on investment.

A well-timed sale (and a well-thought out email campaign to go with it) can work wonders, engaging customers who might not have bought anything from your site in months. Although email is known for its long-term profitability and sustainability, it can still get to work and generate revenue surprisingly quickly. When it’s done correctly, of course.

It drives traffic to your website

Even if an email campaign doesn’t generate any sales or leads, it can still drive traffic to your site and keep people talking about your brand.

Rather than simply pushing special offers and discounts week after week, you can create emails that appeal to potential customers at the awareness and consideration stages of the funnel. Share your blog content, tell the story behind your brand and showcase what makes it unique – all this stuff can not only generate traffic, but put your brand at the forefront of customers’ minds. When they are ready to buy, they’ll know where to go.

It helps build brand awareness

Most of the time, when a customer first spends money with you, they do so because of price or convenience. They’re not necessarily invested in your brand, and they might forget all about you a month or two after their purchase.

Email marketing allows you to keep in touch with these ‘floating’ customers, heightening their awareness of your brand and what it can do for them. Don’t let customers drift away and forget your brand exists: capture their attention and give them no reason to go elsewhere.

It builds trust and customer loyalty

As we’ve already touched on, email marketing allows you to connect with your audience in a way that no other medium does. Search and social ads are still just that – ads. But a well-crafted email doesn’t feel like an ad at all. That’s the key difference.

The powerful segmentation features offered in platforms like Klaviyo and Mailchimp allow you to group different audiences together based on their demographic, interests or prior purchase history. By utilising these features and showering customers’ inboxes with relevant, useful content, you can help make their lives easier and offer them something of real value.

Do this often enough – and for long enough – and customers’ trust in your brand will begin to grow. Shoppers that stumbled across your brand by chance will eventually turn into fans, simply because you’ve made their lives simpler and kept them engaged. Why would they spend their money elsewhere?

It integrates with other marketing channels

You name it, email marketing can work with it. You can use it to bolster your SEO and content marketing efforts, sharing your latest blogs and guides with your audience to generate clicks and shares. You can use it to test out your new landing pages, determining whether your latest CRO tweaks have had a positive impact. You can even use it to drive social engagement by encouraging customers to check out your latest posts and drop a like or comment.

Email marketing is the swiss army knife of the marketing world. Can it perform well as a standalone channel, used in isolation? Sure. But it works best when it’s paired with SEO, CRO and organic social, simply because it feeds into each of them.

It allows you to understand your audience better

We’ve briefly mentioned the likes of Klaviyo and Mailchimp already, and there’s going to be more on them in just a bit. But both of these platforms come with a suite of analytics features built-in, which can be a total game-changer for brands that think they understand their audience but aren’t completely sure.

Once you’ve linked your chosen email platform to your website, it will automatically pull in data about your customers. This can then be used to ‘segment’ your audience into different groups, each of which can be sent separate, tailored emails that appeal to their specific preferences.

The way your audience responds to these emails puts even more data at your fingertips. Everything from open rate to clicks, conversions and more is tracked within Klaviyo or Mailchimp, allowing you to better understand your audience and what they respond to.

Simply put, email takes a lot of the guesswork out of marketing. By A/B testing different email layouts and content, segmenting your audience and using analytics to your advantage, you can understand your customers like never before.

It’s cost-effective

As we’ve said previously, email is arguably the best-performing marketing channel out there in terms of ROI. And what other metric is a better measure of success than that?

Ultimately, any marketing channel you invest in needs to deliver more in terms of revenue than you put into it. Email not only has a virtually unbeatable ROI (provided it’s done correctly), it also delivers results more efficiently and more predictably than many other marketing channels, making it a winner for brands large and small.

It’s here for the long haul

Email isn’t going anywhere. Since the rise of instant messaging and social media sites in the early 2000s, we’ve seen dozens of them come and go – but email has maintained a consistent presence in our lives. It’s used by businesses and individuals alike, covering all demographics and every nation you can think of.

And crucially, email has moved with the times. Popular email clients are now easier to use than they’ve ever been, and the majority of emails are now read on mobile devices. There’s no sign of email’s popularity waning, even decades after its first introduction, making it the perfect medium on which to build a long-term marketing strategy and achieve sustained, consistent growth.

Are there any disadvantages I need to know about?

You’ve probably gathered by now that we love email marketing – we’ve seen first-hand how it can turbocharge the growth of small to medium-sized businesses. But it’d be remiss of us not to acknowledge its shortcomings.

Yep, shock horror: email isn’t perfect. Although its advantages massively outweigh its disadvantages, you should still keep the following in mind before you branch out into email marketing for the first time…

• Too much content (or the wrong content) can alienate customers: It’s true that sending customers well thought-out, helpful and interesting emails can boost engagement, drive conversions and help build brand loyalty. But if you get things wrong and send too much content – or the wrong type of content – your efforts could easily have the opposite effect. Running a successful email marketing campaign is all about balance.
• Emails don’t always deliver correctly: According to Email Tool Tester, emails deliver to our inboxes as intended around 85.7% of the time. Some email services are more reliable than this; Gmail has an average delivery rate of 95%, while AOL’s is just 76%. What this means is that you could spend hours crafting the perfect email, only to later find out that a proportion of your audience never received it.
• Designing an email that’s on-brand can be tricky: Because emails can be viewed on a whole host of different devices (and on a range of different apps and websites), creating an email that looks consistent and on-brand – and that works on every device – is a tall order. It’s a skill that comes with experience and lots of testing.
• There are rules and regulations to keep in mind: You don’t want to fall foul of GDPR regulations. Ensuring your email marketing output complies with all relevant laws can be time-consuming, but it’s a must.
• You’ve got to get people to subscribe first: Before you can send any emails, you’ve got to build an audience. That means enticing them to subscribe when they create an account or make their first purchase. You might need to offer customers something enticing in order to get them onboard, like a discount code, early access or exclusive content.
• There’s a steep learning curve: Even though platforms like Mailchimp and Klaviyo are pretty user-friendly and unintimidating, there’s still an awful lot to learn before you can extract the most out of them. That’s why so many brands turn to experienced agencies like us!

Email marketing examples: five popular formats to start with

You’re still reading, so you must be serious about this whole email marketing thing. That’s why we’re going to start delving into the specifics a little more from now on. What kind of emails should you send to your customers, and how should you format them? Here are a few ideas to get you started…

The newsletter

A classic. We’ve all seen newsletter emails hundreds of times, and it’s this format that perhaps embodies the spirit of email marketing the best. Why? Because it is what you make it.

A newsletter is your chance to be authentically you, giving you the freedom to share industry insights and expertise, some tips and tricks or even a personal message from a member of your team.

Newsletters aren’t necessarily the best revenue drivers, but they’re the perfect way to foster brand loyalty and keep your customers engaged. Hand-picked content and an impactful design are the keys to success here.

The welcome

A customer has just made an account on your site or completed their first purchase. This is your chance to welcome them and thank them for their business.

The right welcome email can really help your brand get off on the right foot with customers. By making them feel at home and subtly guiding them towards the next step (like leaving a review, for instance), you can make welcome emails a surprisingly powerful conversion driver.

The abandoned basket reminder

Otherwise known as cart abandonment emails, these automated messages are sent to potential customers who get halfway through their purchase before backing out.

The goal here isn’t to beg for their business or to push them too hard, it’s to make sure they have all of the information they need to make a purchase. Perhaps they missed the fact that you offer free shipping, or that there’s a limited-time offer on right now? Or maybe they just need a little clarification on what the product is and how it works.

Our advice? Cherrypick a few stand-out USPs and FAQs to include and prompt customers to get in touch if they have any questions.

The promo

Everyone loves a bargain, and there’s no better way to get the word out about your latest sale than by sending out an email to your subscribers.

To start with, write a powerful headline to pull customers in. Once they’ve opened the email, you can then use urgency and scarcity to your advantage. Reminding customers that your sale is only on for a limited time (and while stocks last) can push them to convert on the spot.

The announcement

Got a new product that’s about to launch? It’s time to shout about it! You can build excitement and anticipation before your product even launches, sending out teaser emails that drip feed new information to your subscribers each week.

Then, when launch day arrives, deliver the knock-out blow with a final email that prompts subscribers to head over to your store and get their hands on your latest product. Announcement emails are a great way to not only drive traffic to your site and generate sales, but to keep customers engaged with your brand.

How to get started with email marketing

Build and segment your audience

The first step in any email marketing campaign is to build a subscriber list. Without a reasonably-sized group of subscribers to market to, it’s unlikely your email campaign will achieve much – so growing your list of contacts as much as possible is key.

Once you’ve put together a list of subscribers, you can start to organise them into categories. You can segment your audience by demographic, content preferences, purchase history, interests… the options are pretty much endless.

Choose an email marketing platform

Now you have a list of subscribers, it’s time to get your campaign up and running. It’s at this point you’ll need to consider whether you want to go it alone (and try managing your campaign in-house) or speak to an email marketing agency like ourselves.

Whichever platform you choose, be prepared for a steep learning curve. There’s a lot of different features and quirks to get your head around when you first start out, which is why so many small to medium-sized businesses take the agency route.

If you’re on the fence about what to do, why not book a call in with us? It’s free!

Establish your goals and schedule

So, you’ve got an audience at the ready and your email marketing platform is all set up. Before you get carried away and start sending emails, it’s important to set out your goals and put together a schedule of which emails you’d like to send out, who they’re being sent to and when.

Managing any marketing campaign successfully is all about strategising and forward-planning. Sure, there will be times when you need to think on your feet and deviate from your plans, but every email you send needs to be well thought out and intentional. The basis of success is a thorough email marketing strategy – the more time you spend here, the more likely you are to see results right from the outset.

Create content and build your emails

Here’s where it gets interesting. Let your creativity flow and come up with some content that you feel will resonate with your audience and help you achieve the goals you set out earlier.

Once you’ve put some text together, select (or create) appropriate imagery and head over to your email marketing platform to put the final email together. Make sure you send a test email to yourself before it goes out to your subscribers to catch any typos or layout issues.

See what happens

Once your campaign kicks off, the real work begins. Track every metric and keep an eye on what your subscribers are doing, how they’re interacting with your emails and how well each one performs in terms of clicks and conversions.

The more data you collect, the more you’ll be able to refine your campaigns to suit your subscribers’ preferences. Eventually, continual refinement should help you create a well-oiled, conversion-driving machine.

Organic traffic: What is it and how do you analyse it?

But before we get too ahead of ourselves, let’s cover exactly what organic traffic is and how you can keep tabs on it.

Put simply, organic traffic is all traffic that arrives on your website via search results on sites like Google and Bing. Every time someone clicks on a link to your site through an unpaid search result or AI citation, their visit is an ‘organic’ one – not a paid one.

By contrast, paid traffic includes all visitors that land on your site by clicking on an ad (this could be a Google Shopping ad, a social media ad or any other paid piece of content you’ve put out there).

The main drivers of organic traffic are SEO and content marketing, which work hand-in-hand to boost your site to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

How to track and analyse your site’s organic traffic 

Tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics are SEO go-tos, allowing you to keep a close eye on hundreds of different metrics. As well as allowing you to study organic traffic (and compare month-on-month and year-on-year performance), they allow you to track everything from conversions through to bounce rate, search engine rankings and so much more.

Google’s own analytics tools are essential for all eCommerce businesses, but third-party offerings from the likes of SEMRush and Ahrefs allow you to go even more in-depth. Which tool you choose is up to you – but always double (and triple) check that your site’s tracking is set up correctly. If you’re struggling to get started, we can help with that!

Why did my organic traffic drop? 

So, now we’re clear on what organic traffic is and how you can track it, let’s get to the meat of this article. Below are some of the main reasons for a drop in organic traffic​, some of which are quick fixes and some of which… aren’t.

There’s been an algorithm update

On the subject of quick fixes, they don’t get much simpler than this. Often, search engines like Google carry out algorithm updates, allowing them to provide more relevant, specific results that answer users’ queries and save them time.

If you’ve noticed a drop in rankings and traffic, it could be because of one of these updates – rankings often fluctuate each time the algorithm gets tweaked. There’s nothing you can do about this, besides revisiting your SEO strategy to make sure you’re checking all of the boxes Google and Microsoft want you to check. With a bit of luck, the fluctuations will end next month and your site will climb back up the rankings again.

Once the update has finished rolling out, monitor your rankings and organic traffic for a few days; if things don’t pick up again, further investigation is required.

There are incorrect readings in your analytics platform

Besides algorithm updates, this is the first thing you should check for when you notice a decline in your organic traffic. If you have access to any other platform, cross-reference the data to check if there’s a discrepancy. If your other tool says everything is normal – and there’s no other indication that anything is amiss (like a drop in revenue), you’ll know the issue is with the tracking tool.

Tracking tools like Google Analytics also depend on people accepting cookies on your site (unless you have server-side tracking). If they don’t accept cookies, their data won’t appear in Google Analytics, as per GDPR rules. 

You’re ranking for a lot of zero-click searches

With the rise of Google’s AI Overviews (and AI mode), zero-click searches are becoming far more common – particularly for informational keywords. If your site ranks for a lot of informational keywords, it may be that users are getting their questions answered in the AI overview and aren’t clicking through to any websites, hence the term ‘zero-click search’.

If your content is appearing in one form or another in the AI overview, it might not be getting many clicks – but you’re still winning from a brand awareness perspective.

Your SEO strategy is failing and you’re being outranked

This is pretty much the worst case scenario for SEOs – and the one thing that nobody wants to hear. Unfortunately though, it’s one of the main reasons for rankings trailing off over time.

The reality is that SEO and content marketing move fast, and if you haven’t been adapting your strategy to keep pace with your competitors, you can easily get left behind. Once you’ve ruled out some of the other potential factors listed here, it might be time to give your strategy a second look.

There’s a tech issue with your site and it’s not indexable

If your rankings take a nosedive seemingly out of nowhere, it could be because there’s something wrong with your site from a tech perspective. Search engine rankings depend on bots being able to crawl your site and digest the content that’s on there – so if they can’t crawl it for whatever reason, your content won’t appear in the SERPs.

You’ve been penalised by Google for using ‘black hat’ SEO 

This is a little less common nowadays, but it still happens from time to time. If you’ve been caught using so-called ‘black hat’ SEO techniques (things like keyword stuffing or hidden text), there’s a chance your site has been penalised by Google. If you’ve noticed a sudden drop in rankings and you’ve got some outdated, spammy content on your site, this could be why.

Your site contains poor quality content

SEO isn’t just about keywords and technical optimisations any more: a site can’t rank consistently well on Google or Bing nowadays without good quality content. Successive Google algorithm updates have rewarded great content (and punished poor quality content) more and more as time has gone on, so if your rankings are gradually dropping, it might be time to get rid of some old content that’s no longer up to scratch.

To turn things around, focus on creating relevant, well-researched and well-written content that showcases your brand’s expertise and comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.

You’re up against increased competition

Remember when the only thing on the SERPs was a list of 10 blue links? That was a long time ago now, and gradually it’s become more and more tricky to get clicks even if you’re ranking at the top of page one.

With the prevalence of Google Ads, the creation of featured snippets and now AI Overviews, the SERPs are more competitive than they’ve ever been. You might have multiple position one rankings, but you’re now up against stiff competition from paid ads, AI and more. If you’ve noticed your rankings dropping gradually over the last few years, this could be why.

You’ve recently completed a site migration

Website migrations are an absolute minefield from an SEO perspective, and it’s common for rankings to falter after the migration is carried out. If you’ve recently moved to a new website and your rankings have dropped, go back and make sure that everything has migrated across correctly – and verify that there are no technical issues with the new site that weren’t present on the old one.

Your site has lost some backlinks

If your site relies heavily on backlinks to bolster its position in the SERPs, losing some of those backlinks can have a dramatic impact on rankings. If you’ve recently changed your site’s URL structure (or the site that’s linking to you has been taken down or altered), this could be why your organic traffic has dropped.

Seasonal fluctuations or changing trends are having an impact

The internet never stands still. Trends come and go day in, day out, from brands falling in and out of favour through to new products taking the spotlight and old ones going out of production. Throw seasonal fluctuations into the mix and it’s easy to see just how many variables there are at play here. 

This is where year-on-year comparisons come in handy. If there are historical peaks and troughs from season to season, there’s a good chance history is repeating itself once again.