Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 9 – Incorporating Business Goals

E-commerce

One of the most common uses for Goals is modeling e-commerce. When you are running a web site from which you intend to make money, you want to know who your buyers are, where they come from, and how to make your site more profitable. By counting your visitors who make purchases and comparing this to the rest of your traffic you can find particular traffic patterns among the purchasers and use this to improve your site or marketing.

Tracking Buyers

If you have an online store, you can configure a Goal to track visitors who made purchases. At some point the visitor must get to a receipt page or some page that says “Thank you for your order.” This is the page (or pages, if more than one is possible) that you want to define as the Goal. Then your Goal column tells you how many visits included a purchase. Tracking visitors who reach your store or even the “checkout” page does not indicate that they made a purchase. You want to make sure that the goal page you set up is the one they see after they have paid for their goods.

If you use an outside service to collect payment, such as PayPal or a merchant service provider, you will not have log information about purchases. The best you can do in this case is set the goal as the page users see just before they go to your payment services site. If you have “checkout” links throughout your store that link to the service site, you might want to redesign the site to include a single page just before, so you can track visitors who are on their way to checkout. (You could even do this with a redirection script or web server configuration, as we described in Lesson 7 - Determining Visitor Behavior Patterns.) Most payment services will give you some basic report indicating what percent of visitors actually completed the transaction. You can use this percentage to adjust the Goals Summary tells you to come up with an actual purchase count.

Figure 5. The Referring Domains by Goal report helps distinguish active referrers from qualified referrers.

Once you have configured your Goal, you can then use reports like the Referring Domains by Goal report to find out where your visitors are coming from. Figure 5 shows a sample report from the widgetmanager.com site. From the Goals column you can tell that widgetsource.com is sending the most visitors who make a purchase on the site. But if you look at the Goals as a Percent of Hits column you will see that yahoo.com sends a larger percentage of qualified visitors than widgetsource.com does (61.4% vs. 19.7%). It might be beneficial for the widgetmanager.com staff to develop their relationship with Yahoo! to bring more visitors.

Window Shoppers

Not everyone who gets to your store will make a purchase. Sometimes visitors will shop around, filling a basket with items and then leave. They never check out or they never finish the checkout process. This is sometimes referred to as “abandoned baskets.” Knowing the ratio of ‘shoppers’ to ‘buyers’ can be indicative of problems in your shopping cart software, checkout procedure, or other business factors. For example, if you have an online store and physical stores, some visitors may use your shopping basket to make a shopping list, and then take the list to shop at a physical store. Or you may have visitors who fill shopping baskets at competing sites and choose the one with the lowest price for the entire purchase.

Using Summary’s filters and Goals, you can create a subreport to compare shoppers and buyers. In a new subreport, you would add a filter that tracks only requests to your store pages (subreports and filters were discussed in detail in Lesson 8 - Examining Subsets of Traffic.) Then add a Goal definition for your checkout page. In the time metrics reports, your ‘Goal % of Visits’ column will tell you what percent of shoppers became buyers. Subtract this from 100 to get the percent of abandoned baskets.

Conversion Rates

Figure 6. The Weekly Metrics report includes conversion rates of visitors to buyers.

In most sales metrics, a commonly used ratio is the Conversion Rate. Simply, this is the ratio of leads to sales. If ten customers come into your store and only two make a purchase, then your conversion rate is 20%. Conversion rates can be used in non-commerce business too. If you have other desired outcomes or qualities that you want visitors to have, you can divide the total number of visitors by the number of visitors who reach that goal to get your conversion rate. Summary already does this for you in some reports. There is a column called ‘Goals % of Visits’ that you can find in some reports. One place to find it is the time metrics reports, such as the Weekly Metrics report in Figure 6.

Another column, ‘Goals % of Hits,’ is used in the same sense, except that it refers to specific hits, rather than an entire visit. This column shows by default in the Referring Domains and Search reports. Since all of these reports relate to a specific hit (the page or request the user first made to the site), this is a conversion rate for those reports.