Conversions had gone down unexpectedly for one of my clients.  But we’d also had a week of bad weather, and their leads normally slow down when bad weather strikes. 

But then conversions were down the following week too. Two bad weeks in a row meant I was starting to get suspicious.   

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I then noticed the client had added a chat tool to their website. Normally they keep me in the loop about any website changes, but they forget to tell me about this one.

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So the chat tool did not have conversion tracking enabled on it. That means, any chats that occurred were not being captured as conversions.  Phone calls and email enquiries were being captured as conversions - but not chat's.

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After learning the above, I thought this is why our conversions appeared to have gone down. i.e. instead of calling or emailing, some people are now using chat to contact my client. And since these chat's aren't being captured as conversions, conversion looked lower than normal.

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But, I still needed to confirm this theory with numbers. That meant I needed to manually add the total number of chats + total calls + total emails. Then I'd be able to see if total conversions had gone up, gone down, or stayed the same. 

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The client had told me they were getting about 3-5 people a day contacting them via chat.  But when I got the actual chat data from the client it was actually only 1.8 chats per day.

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When I combined chats + calls + emails I got the numbers in the graph below. The red line is when the chat tool was turned on.

So there was a pretty clear drop in conversions as soon as chat was turned on.  And this was at a time when we were heading to summer so we’d expect conversions to be going up.