Engage-Digital

I’ve always worked on the basis that doing calculations using mixed metrics ( by which in this case I mean page views, visits/sessions & uniques) whilst doing an analysis is generally not good. There are some exceptions but when looking at conversion I have tended to avoid calculating it based on page views as a percentage of visits/sessions.

There have been many cases when, in my work with clients, I have faced situations in which their conversion figures have consistantly been a shade higher or lower than my own over a given time period. These have in almost all cases been due to their figures being based on actual sales as measured in their sales management systems whilst I have generally only had access to the analytics data. Not an ideal situation as I would always rather work with actual sales data but it hasn’t been a major concern since the data is generally trended over several months and we are able to see where the changes have occurred – crucial insight has still been available.

In one instance I broke my own rule and took it a step further by looking at the conversion rate using page views to the Order Complete page instead of visits and naturally the figure went up. Of course there are several reasons why the Order Complete page may be viewed more than once in a single visit and not all relating to multiple purchases.

In a follow up session I looked in more depth at regional visitor profiling using weighted segmentation described here. It showed a significant difference in conversion (based on visits only) between the UK and “Rest of World” – not surprising since in this particualr instance overseas delivery was not catered for. However there was a small market oversees that was using the site for purchases to be delivered in the UK.

I got back to thinking about the original difference in conversion between their figures and mine and decided to run a comparative analysis of the Order Complete page based on UK segment and “Rest of World”, this time looking at page views per visit on the Order Complete page and trending over the Christmas period. The pattern became much clearer. Whilst visitors from the UK viewed the Order Complete page on average once per session throughout the period, page views per visit on the Order Complete page for the “Rest of World” segment spiked at 2 around Christmas time.

Rationale? The site didn’t have multiple addresses functionality in the checkout process and so overseas visitors looking to do their Christmas shopping had to repeat the process for each purchase.

I would still be wary of doing this kind of thing but in some circumstance it can yield some surprising and interesting results.