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
-
Specific Industry Website Conversion Rates: Lighting
Hi All, There's loads of info around on general retail conversion rates, but does anyone have any experience with online lighting shops and typical conversion rates? This is a highly price driven shopper, and from my experience so far they bounce around looking for the best price... We've recently taken ownership of this new site, and I'm not sure I can relate general metrics to this site... although there is lots of work to do on here! Cheers in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | b4cab0 -
Bounce Rate Reduce day by day? how?
Hi, I have implemented enhance ecommerce with tag manager after that all working fine but bounce rate suddenly started reducing. Then again i implemented ehance ecommerce then mobile bounce rate also started reducing. As per me tag assistant showing okay. Can you please check my attached site and let me know the issue? Thanks! John
Reporting & Analytics | | varo0 -
*Dramatic* reduction in bounce rate, why?
Hi all I cannot pin this down to one of -new theme using Thesis 2 and Social Triggers, or -implementing Moz Does the Moz crawler linger on page? I'd love to know why this is happening 7iSnNfC
Reporting & Analytics | | TimMarsh0 -
Has GA changed how it calculates bounce rate?
Updated website from Magento backend to Wordpress and since the redeploy, my bounce rate has dropped from 40% to 4%. I did check to see if there was duplicate GA tracking code but only one call. I checked reports under "visitor flow" and one page visits seem inline with the previous bounce rate. Weird. Never experienced this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Timmmmy0 -
Google Images referral visits fell off a cliff
As of 28-Jan, referral traffic from Google images (/imgres) to my domain has pretty much vaporized. Visits are down 85%. It's actually not a disaster because most of those visits were from poorly optimized alt tags that were resulting in low quality visits. The interesting thing is that visit duration is up 80% during the same period. So I'm asking this question out of curiosity more than anything. Is this likely an algorithm tweak? I can't think of any major changes on my end. There's only one other data point to mention but I don't see how they'd be connected. I did two PRWEB releases on 29-Jan and 30-Jan that resulted in a few hundred new no-follow links back to my site. 22b7k2.png
Reporting & Analytics | | JonDiPietro0 -
Goals and Conversions in Multi-Channel-Funnel
Hi, we defined several goals in Google Analytics, and the reported amount of conversions seems to be correct. Today, I switched into the multi-channel funnel to look at assisting conversions etc.. There, the total number of conversions is higher than the amount of conversions in our goal-section (807 vs. 734). Did I miss something? I always thought the numbers should be the same? Any idea why they differ that much (time span was 14 days)... Thanx...
Reporting & Analytics | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Calculating page visit duration for bounced visits?
IS there any way on Google Analytics to calculate page visit duration for bounced visits? if so, what would need to be done?
Reporting & Analytics | | offthemaptravels0 -
I am showing no (not provided) visits in GA. Is that possible?
When reviewing Organic search traffic on my site, there no (not provided) visits. Not one. I searched for the term while viewing all keyword visits and still nothing! I find that hard to believe that is possible with 6,000 monthly visits. Is something wrong? Help?!
Reporting & Analytics | | SignifyMarketing0