Drop in Inquiries through Web while no drop in Web Traffic

Question

I want to ask this from those who might have encountered or may be aware of such a situation.

We are operating since 1998 through web and our decent chunk of business comes from web inquiries (request for quotation forms and contact us forms) due to good ranking in google pages. But recently we are facing a big drop in web inquiries and this is to the tune of a 90% drop in some months. What's strange is that our website traffic has not dropped (only 10-20% drop in some months but recovered in other months). Please note, We haven't updated our site in this period and this issue is occurring from the past 8 months.

Website visitors are coming to contact us and quotation forms but not sure why there are no inquiries at all. For reference, I am adding 1-month traffic small snapshot which shows a comparison to the same month last year, but last year same month we received more than 15 inquiries, this year only 1. We have an SEO expert inhouse but he too is not able to find any reason for this phenomenal change because neither our business changed nor our traffic. Also note, it's not an HTTP to HTTPS conversion issue because that went smoothly and as I said our traffic didn't drop phenomenally like the inquiries.

Can anyone of you geniuses knows or discover what could be the issue?

Answer 1

From the point of my own experience, the cause of this issue is located not in the interpretation of analytics data, but rather in any kind of technical issue, which could be related to:

• technical kind of gathering of web inquiries (how work forms, in which browser and so on)
• how web inquiries are (technically) tracked and how inquiriy data comes to analytics.

90% drop of inquiries with simultan traffic non-drop just can't be a data interpretation issue. On any place you loose inquiries. Where - that is the megabucks question. Such issues are mostly often caused by broken inquiry form. For example, in the mostly used browser version a certain form javascript works no longer - since an browser update... - and this is, where i would begin investigations.

What i would do beside checking the inquiry form:

• i would look into analytics browser list and compare converting browser before and after drop, to get into knowledge, which browsers are mostly affected,
• i would wear my developer glasses and penetrate affected browsers with inquiries, while looking into console.
• i would make use of a debugging proxy, like Fiddler, and investigate, what happens with inquiry data on its way.

Another thing i would check - is everything ok with an indexing of your pages? Inquiries could drop, just because pages with form were deindexed and are no longer visible to your users?

You should understand - nobody is able to give you an authoritative answer, why exactly you experience such drop. But, there are some ideas, where you could investigate, and where such issues could be located.