Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Conversion Rate Question: Should I Measure Visits or Unique Visits?
-
When you measure conversion rates, is the equation:
- conversion rate = visits/conversions
or
- conversion rate = unique visits/conversions
I ask because it can actually make a pretty big difference in the conversion rate. For example, if you visit my ecommerce website 100 times before buying something (and assuming you're my only visitor), then my conversion rate is 100% _if I'm determining conversion rates by unique visits/conversions. _However, it's only 1% _if I'm determining conversion rates by visits/conversions. _Wow!
Now this is clearly an extreme example, but it should serve to illustrate the point that in more reasonable cases, the way the data is measured can have a potentially significant impact on the conversion rate.
Is there an industry standard for this?
Am I missing something really basic?
Also, here's a little bit of context for the question:
I run an ecommerce website powered by the Magento CMS and I'm trying to measure my conversion rate in Google Analytics for individual products. Google Analytics shows me my site wide conversion rate, but apparently I have to do some customization in order to measure conversion rates on the product level. That's fine, but I want to make sure I'm measuring my product conversions in a standard way.
Thanks for any and all help!
Adam
-
Conversion rate = Conversions / Visitors (you had it flipped around)
Choosing whether to track unique or not depends on the buying cycle - some items (think high cost, high research) are never converted on a unique visit so by tracking unique visitors, your conversion rate is 0%.
The best solution is to track conversion per recurring visitor (e.g. conversions / unique, conv / 1st return, conv / 2nd return, etc). This will give you a better example of how many visits per conversion on average it takes for someone to convert and you can try to improve the rate at each stage.
-
conversion rate = **unique **visits/conversions is the recommended equation but there are other factors to consider in your equation to obtain the true conversion rate.
Not every visitor can be considered a conversion opportunity. Here is a good article on Kaushik.net to help you calculate a true conversion rate for your website.
-
Personally, I think unique visits are more relevant then visits. If you go back to the example I used in my original question, if 1 person visits my site 100 times before making their purchase, it makes sense to me that my conversion rate is measured as 100%, and it doesn't make sense that the conversion rate was 1%. Now that's my opinion, however I don't want to measure my conversion rates that way if the industry measures it a completely different way.
Though after I re-read your response I'm beginning to think that you're saying something very similar to Kevin Budzynski, which is that you can measure two different things if you look at visits and unique visits. That's a good point. I'll have to think about this more - but I suppose my other question continues to stand, which is, is there an industry standard?
-
We are planning to measure both for pretty much that reason. Yet, that doesn't tell me which (if either) is an industry standard in ecommerce. Understanding the industry standard is important if I want to understand how my conversion rates stack up against other merchants in the industry.
-
I think it depends on whether you look more closely at visits or unique visits as a definition of traffic. It also depends on what you are trying to determine like how many visits it takes to drive a conversion or how many individual people convert on average.
-
Measure both. By doing so, you will be able to see trends you may not see by doing one or the other.
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
-
Attribution of conversions to payment gateway in Google Analytics
Hi all, We have been having a problem for a while now where most transactions are attributed to referrals from our payment gateway Sagepay. The issue started a couple of months ago, when we finally upgraded our website to https:// for logged in users and transactions. Before, when we were using http://, transactions were attributed to the correct channel. Even weirder, we upgraded 4 websites and only 2 of them have the issue now, the other two continue to attribute transactions correctly. I added Sagepay to the referral exclusion list which made no difference. Over the weekend, we upgraded to the global site tag and it seems to have improved somewhat, but yesterday 50% of transactions were still attributed to referral/sagepay. I am also seeing an odd issue, where for half of the transactions, the revenue and transaction are attributed to one channel, but the products (quantity) are attributed to another. One of the channels is always referral/sagepay and the other is the channel that the transaction should be attributed to. Has anyone seen this issue before? I'd appreciate any tips that might help us fix this issue. Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | Feb 21, 2018, 8:41 AM | ViviCa10 -
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 | Apr 6, 2017, 9:08 PM | Alick3000 -
Fixing Bounce Rate between Domain and Subdomain
Currently, the way our site is set up, our clients generally visit our homepage and then login through a separate page that is a subdomain, or they can read our blog/support articles that are also on separate subdomains. From my understanding, this can be counted as a bounce, and I know this sorta of site structure isn't ideal, but with our current dev resources and dependencies, fixing this isn't going to happen overnight. Regardless, what would be the easiest way to implement this fix witihn the Google Analytics code? EX: If someone visits our site at X.com, and then wants to login at portal.X.com, I don't want to count that as a bounce. Any insight is appreciated! Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | Feb 14, 2017, 9:30 PM | KathleenDC0 -
Google Analytics Question - Impressions & Queries Up, Sessions Down
I'm working with a client who, according to the Google Query report, impressions and sessions are up since we've started work with them about 6 months ago, but Google sessions are down. In moz, we're seeing a gradual, but steady increase in search visibility specifically with Google. Note: this is all organic. From when we started tracking queries, the first month we were tracking there were 43,581 impressions and 690 click throughs for the month. This past month there were 98,293 queries and 1015 clicks throughs for the month (granted not year over year data) - of these 1,015 clicks, 995 of them were from web. However, for those same time periods, sessions from Google are down over 30% - 1,750 vs. 1,189. I'm not sure how to interpret this. I realize that clicks and sessions are not a straightforward comparison, but I would think that if clicks were up according to the query report that sessions would also be up. Is it that some of these clicks are bouncing and therefore not being tracked as a session? Is there a potential issue with how data is being tracked?
Reporting & Analytics | Feb 29, 2016, 3:03 PM | Corporate_Communications0 -
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 | Feb 4, 2015, 3:26 PM | PeteC121 -
Open internal links in a new tab increase bonus rate?
Hello! This week I used a simple method to reduce my blog Google Analytics bounce rate. My blog all the posts are guides, in order to follow them, user need to download a zip file (same zip file). Otherwise they can't. Therefore I added a separate blog post to download all the necessary files. As a result of that I can reduce my bounce rate from 62-70% to 45-50% level. Now I'm thinking to open that zip file download page in a new tab. If I open my blog zip file download page, in a new tab. It will again increase my bounce rate? I reduced my bounce rate using that zip file download page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | Apr 4, 2013, 10:49 PM | Godad0 -
Google Analytics: Difference Between Goal Conversions & Goal Completions
When using Google Analytics, what is the difference between total goal conversions and total goal completions? We have many goals set up in a lead generation environment. Therefore, the only element of conversion is submitted a lead and arriving on the "Thank You" page. THose thank you pages are tagged accordingly. When we run reports though, the number of "Total Goal Conversions" and "Total Goal Completions" never match up.
Reporting & Analytics | Dec 11, 2011, 8:50 AM | eMagineSEO0 -
Google Analytics: how many visits from country Google domains?
Hello, I manage a site with visitors from many different countries. With Google Analytics, it is normal to see the number of visitors from each search engine. However, I would like to identify the number of visitors from each Google-search contry domain. How many visitors from Google.com? How many from Google.co.uk. And from Google.co.zm? And so on. Anybody knows if this is possible and if yes, how can it be done? Thank you in advance, Dario
Reporting & Analytics | May 12, 2011, 11:40 AM | Darioz0