More traffic, less conversion.
Sessions rose 11% while conversion fell every month. What product-family reviews, 26 promotions and an A+ content update showed about fixing conversion before buying more traffic.
Matías Gaglio ·
Leer en español
Traffic went up. Conversion went down every month.
After the ad audit, Revolution Supply's Amazon account got more efficient and more visible. Sessions in November were about 11% above August. Unit session percentage, Amazon's conversion rate, fell in each of those months. More people were looking, and a smaller share of them were buying.
| Month | Sessions vs August | Conversion | B2B share of sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| August | — | 9.52% | 14.4% |
| September | +12% | 9.45% | 13.3% |
| October | +8% | 9.23% | 13.6% |
| November 1–9 | +11% | 8.47% | 13.0% |
That changes the question. If conversion drops, buying more traffic only buys more people who leave. The next dollar of work belonged on the listings: price, Buy Box, stock, content and promotions.
Each product family failed for a different reason.
I reviewed the families that lost the most sales one segment at a time, using Business Reports for our own numbers and Stackline for category and competitor share. No single cause explained the drop.
Content and visibility
Sales fell 24 to 34%. Ad clicks fell 51 to 59% against about 20% account-wide. Conversion was 8.7% against 14.1% for the category and 17.9 to 26.7% for the leading competitors. The listing's image content score had dropped from 100% to 75%.
Share lost to one competitor
The segment was flat (−1%) while our sales fell 31%. Our share went from 12.5% to 8.7% as one competitor grew from 11% to 44%, and ad spend on the family had fallen to zero.
Operations, not ads
Stock-outs in two product families, inventory swapped between twin listings, and a kit listed without its spline key. Ads can't fix any of these.
On one core lug nut line the visible review count fell from about 5,600 to about 2,000 in July, and its share of the segment fell from 20.2% to 12.6%. Reviews are part of conversion too.
Small in sales, useful as a conversion signal.
Since August the account ran 26 promotions and coupons. Together they brought in about 0.7% of total sales. At that scale they don't drive the business, but they show clearly which offers buyers respond to.
Lug nut discounts work
About 80% of promotion sales came from lug nuts. The best lug nut discounts converted at 11 to 18%, well above the account's 8.5 to 9.5%. Spacer discounts that ran converted at 3.8 to 6.3%.
Ten promotions sold nothing
Ten promotions, almost all on spacers, produced zero sales. They weren't bad offers. Amazon had flagged the products as "Restricted ASIN", so the discounts never reached shoppers. The fix is a support case, not a bigger discount, so spacer promotions are paused until it is resolved.
The reorder coupon is underused
A 10% coupon on a second purchase pays back about 7x, but it went live on only 159 of the 1,527 products uploaded and has used about 2% of its budget. Getting the rest of the catalog approved is the cheapest growth on the list.
One-piece lug nuts convert better.
Comparing construction types, one-piece lug nuts converted at 12.04% against 8.81% for two-piece. Some of that is price and product mix, but it is a clear signal for where to put ad budget and what content should explain. One-piece construction is now a deliberate message in the listings rather than a line in the specifications.
Content that answers "will it fit, and will it last?"
Alongside promotions, the A+ content is being reworked around the two questions buyers ask most. The work in progress so far:
- A quality review of fitment and installation modules across A+ pages, checking that every listed vehicle shows correctly on desktop and mobile.
- An extra-vehicles callout and seat-type labels in the fitment module, which also fixes a vehicle that was missing on mobile.
- More space for one-piece construction and the 72-hour salt spray test, with the test's scope stated rather than turned into a lifetime promise.
- Title A/B tests on two lug nut lines through Manage Your Experiments, and a fitment-confirmation approach with a checker script to keep compatibility data consistent.
I'll publish a fuller write-up of the A+ redesign once the tests have results.
Fix conversion before buying traffic.
Check the basics
Price, Buy Box share and stock on the top sellers, every week.
Unblock promotions
Resolve the restricted-ASIN case, then restart spacer offers.
Expand the coupon
Get the remaining ~1,370 products onto the reorder coupon.
Plan the holidays
Reuse the best September lug nut discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.