There are many good metrics that help us understand customer behavior on our websites. Conversion rate, page views per visitors, average time in website, average number of pages to purchase etc etc, and you can segment them. But sometimes they leave us hungry and unfulfilled. I have not seen these two metrics a lot in off the shelf packages but I like them a lot because they can be deeply insightful about customer behavior, specifically in context of an outcome. The metrics are “ Days to Purchase” & “ Visits to Purchase”. I am sure you've seen them used before, if you have not read on.
Power Electronics Notes By Arun Kumar Pdf. (I am using the term purchase here but there is nothing unique about ecommerce, you can use these metrics if your site exists to gather leads or get people to download pdf’s or for tech support. All that is required is a robust understanding at your end of what the “outcome” is on your website.) Most of the current crop of web analytics metrics (KPI’s if you will) are very much session based. Not all but most of them.
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The “limitation” of session based metrics is that it presumes a “closure” in one session (one visit if you will). That is usually not the case.
Customers visit your website, come back more times, depending on why you exist, and then maybe close the deal (buy, give a lead, get an answer, send your CEO a nasty email about how dysfunctional your website is). These two metrics are “pan-session” metrics and since they accommodate for how customers really use most website they can be deeply insightful. Ok enough teasing, here are the specifics ( though I have to admit I am much better at this topic in front of a white board than a blog post, I ask for your patience because this is a bit complex). Assumptions: • Your website uses some kind of “sessionization” methodology. For the most part, regardless of if you use weblogs or javascript tags to collect data sessionization happens using cookies. Either via your web analytics tool or your web server platform. Both are fine.
• Your website sets both transient session cookies and persistent 100% anonymous “user_id” cookies. • Like anything that relies on cookies it is optimal if you are on first party cookies to improve quality (it won’t eliminate error, just reduce it). [PS: If you are not on first party cookies I strongly recommend that you badger your analytics provider to switch you to first party asap, all the big boys/girls support first party cookies.] Definitions: • Avg Visits to Purchase: Average number of sessions from first website interaction to Purchase. • Avg Days to Purchase: Average number of days from first website interaction to Purchase. Why should you measure these kpi’s? Most often what is lost in all our analysis is the fact that there are many different interactions for someone before they purchase.
People come, they see, they come back, they see something else, they go read amazon reviews, they do price comparison and then for some weird reason even though you sell at a really high price they come buy from you. Session based metrics (say all the off the shelf path analysis reports you see in your web analytics tools on the market today) don’t really illustrate this. So as you run your affiliate marketing campaigns or your PPC campaigns or direct marketing efforts, what is the value of the first visit by a customer and should you pay more to get customers into the door because they have longevity? One simple reason to measure these kpi’s is to get a true understanding of “how long” it takes people to buy from your website and is that behavior different across different segments of your website customers.