Why Are New Contact Conversion Rates Dropping?

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Data Snacks. I’m Monja, a product marketer here at Databox.

Today we’re going to show you how to diagnose a common marketing problem––” why are my conversion rates dropping?”

We’ll take a look at New Contacts created in HubSpot Marketing, look at why this key metric, and its companion, conversion rate, appear to be declining and use other metrics to understand the reasons behind it. 

In this episode of Data Snacks, I’m going to show you how to:

1. Track New Contacts and New Contacts vs Website Traffic over the last 12 months
2. Analyze the nature of the decline. Is it an anomaly or a trend?
3. Look at other factors over the same period to help understand why this is happening.

Below, you can view the full episode, or, keep reading for a fully transcribed version of the episode complete with relevant screenshots.

Here’s what I want to see––I want to track New Contacts in a few ways, as a number comparison with the previous 12 months, as a line chart showing both New Contacts and Website Traffic (Sessions), and as a conversion rate. This should tell me how well our website is converting visitors into contacts, and if there’s a problem, why?

Let’s Create the Dashboard

To do this, I’m going to first drag and drop a line chart onto my dashboard and select New Contacts from my HubSpot Marketing data source, with the Last 12 months Date Range, and compare it to the previous period. This chart shows me that my New Contacts performance has been basically flat over the past 12 months and comparable to the previous 12 months.

Next, I’m going to select a Combo line and bar chart, and select New Contacts from HubSpot for the Bar Chart and Sessions from Google Analytics for the Line Chart. This chart shows me that while new contacts have been flat, website traffic has been increasing pretty dramatically.

That makes me think that conversion rates are off, so let’s take a look. I’m going to create a new line chart over the same period of time and select the New Contacts Conversion Rate metric from HubSpot. As you can see, conversion rates are in pretty steady decline over the past 12 months. It’s not a spike, but a trend. The question is, why?

Interpreting the Data

To diagnose, or at least identify possible problems, let’s look at some of the more common issues

First, I’m going to look at sources, so I pull in a New Contacts by Source table visualization from the Metric Library – that shows me that all sources were down significantly from the previous 12 months, except for Offline, or outbound efforts. So it’s not a specific source problem, it’s that we pivoted away from inbound marketing as a lead generation source altogether!

Next, I want to see if our content marketing efforts slowed down too, so I built a line chart showing all of our monthly sessions over the same period. Well, traffic is up, especially organic search, so content marketing is doing its job!

So let’s focus on landing page conversion with a Landing Page Performance metric from the Metrics Library. As you can see, performance was pretty low overall.

Finally, let’s assess the possible impact of declining contact conversion rates on pipeline and sales. A number chart shows Opportunities dropping slightly and new Customers only growing slightly year-over-year.   

So How is Our Contact Conversion Rate Doing

From this dashboard, we can draw some important conclusions. First, our observed drop in contact conversion rate from digital marketing is most likely directly related to our decision to pivot to more direct or outbound customer acquisition, not a result of top funnel marketing campaigns or content efforts.  

At a high level, tracking your primary marketing metrics, like New Contacts and Conversion rates, helps you assess not only marketing performance but also strategic decisions that may affect digital marketing. 

Want help creating this report? Start a chat with one of our dashboard experts and they’ll help build this report for you for free. 

If you haven’t already, just create your free Databox account and reach out to our team either via chat or email.

See you next time.