Forum Moderators: buckworks
Which is best?
Total Visitors / Total Orders
Unique IP's / Total Orders
(Unique Ip's - bots) / Total Orders
I am also looking for some pre-built tools that might help me improve my conversion rate, by mining my log files for useful info.
Any insight or help would be appreciated
Instabill
For retail, I prefer Sales / Visits = Sales per Visit, because the end objective is sales, not orders. If you can make changes that result in people buying higher ticket items, you won't see that success reflected when you use orders / visit. If you only sell one item, it really doesn't matter which you use.
A better metric is Gross Margin per Visit; an increase here means you have been more successful getting people to buy your most profitable items.
Still better is Net Margin per Visit, which accounts for returns, and return rates differ quite a bit by price or by category. For example, it is often true higher average prices generate higher return rates, and if you don't net out Returns, you can get fooled into thinking you are doing better by selling higher-priced items.
And finally, if you understand that certain items have higher overhead in terms of receiving them or shipping them, or customer service on them (phone calls or e-mails per box shipped), then Operating Margin per Visit is the "fully loaded" metric.
Which of the above is most useful to you depends on how big you are. The bigger you are, the more precise you want to be, because the differences can add up to millions of $$ at higher end volumes.
If your objective is to improve, it probably doesn't matter that much how you calculate it, as long as you're consistent.
Improvement is then all about tracking the changes you make and measuring their effect on that conversion ratio - however you've come to it.
Do you have a mechanism to tie a sale back to the way in which the customer was introduced to your site?
This is absolutely key if you're advertising all over the place. It's the age old marketing saying;
"I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted. I just don't know which half".
Are site is developed with ASP & no we don't have a good way to track how the customer was introduced to the site. This is something I want to focus on more in the future.
Can you point me at some code or software that will assist in customer tracking?
Thanks...
I would imagine that third party solutions are out there to provide such tracking, however it is not that difficult to create your own system - it doesn't take too long, and you have complete control at the end of the day without having to pay anyone else and hope that they stay in business!
You just need a mechanism to read and write cookies and the ability to read and write a database.
As always, several ways to skin a cat, but the easiest is to manage a cookie called "cookieIntroducer", that holds an identifier for the campaign that first brought a visitor to your site.
Now to set that cookie, one way is create separate doorway pages for each campaign. Say you advertise using Google AdWords. You might make your target URL for that campaign the following:
[yourdomain.com...]
On fromgoogle.html, you first check to see if the visitor already has "cookieIntroducer" set, and if not, set "cookieIntroducer = google".
Do this on each doorway page, and have a separate one on your homepage that sets "cookieIntroducer = directrequest" (or something like that).
Before setting "cookieIntroducer" don't forget to check that it's empty - you don't want to overwrite the value with something else if, say, a visitor comes to your page from a Google Adwords, adds you to their favourites, and then comes back later straight to the homepage. After setting "cookieIntroducer", increment a value in your database that indicates a new visitor from that campaign, call it "hits".
Finally, on your sale complete page, read "cookieIntroducer" and increment a value in your database that indicates a sale from that campaign, call it "sales".
Over time, you'll then be able to look into your database and from your table of "Introducer"'s see how many hits you received from that campaign, and how many you converted.
Cheers.
Always make sure that any doorway pages you create don't upset the back button operation - so that the user can naturally go back to the place they saw and clicked on your advertisment.
Not only is this in most PPC terms and conditions, it is also in your best interests. If somebody can't "back" to the place they came from (say it was a Google Adword), then they will most likely go back to www.google.com and enter their search term again - costing you another impression without clickthrough.
302 is probably your safest bet.
