Should I use sessions or unique visitors to work out my ecommerce conversion rate?
-
Hi all
First question here but I've been lingering in the shadows for a while.
As part of my companies digital marketing plan for the next financial year we are looking at benchmarking against certain KPIs.
At the moment I simply report our conversion rate as Google Analytics displays it. I was incorrectly under the impression that it was reported as unique visits / total orders but I've now realised it's sessions / total orders. At my company we have quite a few repeat purchasers. So, is it best that we stick to the sessions / total orders conversion rate? My understanding is multiple sessions from the same visitor would all count towards this conversion rate and because we have repeat purchasers these wouldn't be captured under the unique visits / total orders method? It's almost as if every session we would have to consider that we have an opportunity to convert. The flip side of this is that on some of our higher margin products customers may visit multiple times before making a purchase. I should probably add that I'll be benchmarking data based on averages from the 1st April - 31st of March which is a financial year in the UK.
The other KPI we will be benchmarking against is visitors. Should we change this to sessions if we will be benchmarking conversion rate using the sessions formula? This could help with continuity and could also help to reveal whether our planned content marketing efforts are engaging users.
I hope this makes sense and thanks for reading and offering advice in advance.
Joe
-
Matthew makes great points. I'd add to this that having conversions tied to membership data makes it all the more person specific. This is why you'll here numbers like 74% conversion rate for Amazon Prime members (see: https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/06/25/amazon-prime-members-convert-74-time). Aside from better tracking you can begin to see the value for Amazon in having members...
- Similar to Facebook they're collecting user data per person and building a massive user base aside from just sales.
- Better tracking.
- Higher conversion rates.
- Top of mind branding.
- Upselling
- And so on...
You get the idea. That's why when you go to Amazon.com the only pop-up or animated prompt you'll see on the home page is to "sign-in". Obviously, this could be something out of scope for your project currently, but food for thought down the road.
-
I'd argue there is value in looking at and benchmarking both numbers, though you might not get an accurate picture of both through Google Analytics. You want to know how many sessions ended up in an order, regardless of how many repeat customers there were that converted. As you said, every visit could end up in an order (you could get a little more detailed and segment to clarify just how many sessions qualify) and you want to know just how true that is. At the same time, you want to know how many unique people placed an order as well and repeat order rates.
Here is the tricky part. Google Analytics is pretty good at telling you how many sessions resulted in an order (the conversion rate you see in goal reports is goals per session). With the Time to Purchase report, you can get a fairly decent idea of sessions it took for those higher margin products. Now the other side: unique users. Users is wonky in how it is calculated (for instance one customer uses different browsers/devices or your customer deleted their cookies) so knowing how many users converted won't always give you the number you are after and, in my mind, it isn't reliable enough to benchmark.
What I do to get at the number of unique customers and orders per customer is use other tools (CRM, order system, etc.) to track that number--those systems are designed around people not sessions, so you are going to get a far more accurate picture of how many unique people placed an order. That is your benchmark, but you can map order dates and/or transaction IDs to GA so that you can understand traffic patterns for repeat customers and how they might differ.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Drop in Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
Hi guys, I have recently seen a large drop in bounce rate (from GA) which seems unnatural for one of our clients website. Since the start of 2018, the bounce rate was consistently between 40-60%, and then saw a random spike, and now for the past two weeks, the bounce rate is below 10%. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas if this is a problem with GA, or the site itself. Site: https://www.zoomocarcredit.com/ Any comments/feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! Jack. SnP0Hc4
Reporting & Analytics | | ChemistryMarketing0 -
Track conversion from paypal express/Apple pay
Hi All, Is there any way to track apple pay conversion or paypal express conversion in Google Analytics? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
GWT Change of Address not working
I work at a .jsp site where we have vanity urls that 301 to the www,domainname.com/index.jsp?c_id. Now when I do a change of address in GWT it tells me that it can't fulfill the change of address cause the redirect goes to www.domainname.com/index.jsp instead of www.domainname.com. I could create a GWT account for www.domainname.com/index.jsp/ but that is a 404 (it needs the c_id). How would I do my change of address?
Reporting & Analytics | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
High Bounce Rate on traffic generating area of our site
Hi, Our eCommerce site currently includes a blog section known as Igloo which we have filled with unique and helpful content that is useful to a fair few people, not just customers of ours. It currently attracts a large number of visitors (more than the actual eCommerce side of the site in actual fact) organically who aren't currently customers of ours. Very few of these turn in to paying clients so it's not really a money spinner but it has worked quite well from a linkbait perspective / traffic generation perspective and undoubtedly a few of these people do end up making a purchase on the actual shopping end of our site. We're look at ways to encourage these people finding help on this free resource to take a look at our homepage and hopefully make an order but in the meantime I am worried that there may be a few downsides to us creating this content: Google may see us more as a help site than a shopping site. Since selling products is where we make our money this could ultimately be a bad thing. Our bounce rate is REALLY high (I'm talking around 94%) on the help site versus around 20% on the eCommerce site. I guess people land on the article they want, read it and then disappear. Would this bounce rate skew our entire site stats and ultimately result in decreased performance in the SERPS. I would appreciate your opinions and, in the event you do feel it may be hurting us overall perhaps some suggestions on how to mitigate the effects? Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Google Analytics and Bounce Rates Query - Should I block access from foreign countries ?
Hi , When I look at my google analytics for my UK Website, I can see alot of visits come from outside the UK , i.e Brazil and USA. Both of which give me almost 100% bounce rates from people visiting from there. I am wondering, if google looks at bounce rates with regards to ranking factors and should I therefore block access to my site from visitors outside the UK ?... Would this help increase my rankings ? Given that we only serve uk customers, I cant see any benefit of allowing non uk customers the ability to see the site . what does people think ? thanks pete
Reporting & Analytics | | PeteC121 -
Difference between Enhance Ecommerce & Event Tracking ?
Hello guys, Difference between Enhance Ecommerce & Event Tracking ? If i implement Enhance Ecommerce then no need to configure event tracking? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | bkmitesh1 -
False Conversion Data in GA
Hi all, I have a problem with Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics. Our contact form conversion completes when the user hits the Thank You page. Yesterday we had an increase in conversions that didn't correlate to form submission emails. It appears that one person filled out our form, then returned (hit the back button?) to the Thank You page another 8 times as there were 8 entrances to the Thank You page and it's currently no indexed. Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Or should I just note in Analytics that the Conversion data is wrong for that day and note how many? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | nsauser0 -
Using the SEOmoz API with SEOTools for Excel
Hi there, I'm trying to use the SEOmoz API in Excel, to get the Domain Authority and MozRank for a bunch of URLs. I've tried multiple techniques, but I can't get it to work. The code I currently got is from SEOGadgets post, and I'm using the SEOTools for Excel plugin. Here is what I got: =JsonPathOnUrl("http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/url-metrics/"&A3&"?Cols=68719476736";"$..pda";"<httpdownloader cache="false" pause="1" authenticateuser="REDACTED" authenticatepassword="REDACTED" requestmethod="GET"></httpdownloader>") The problem is, it always returns 1 for every URL. Can anyone explain what I'm doing wrong? Or show me an easier way to do this? I have double checked the API keys and tested on multiple URLs.
Reporting & Analytics | | Qon1