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
-
Measure traffic from serp feature
Hey 🙂 Does anyone know if there's a way of measuring traffic coming through serp features? I know that you can get some info on SEMrush but not traffic coming from those specific results like stories and instant answers. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Anna_90 -
Bounce Rates: Leaving my domain.com/blog to shop on mydomain.com counts as bounce rate?
Hello! I have a kind of difficult question. On my main domain i have: Store: mydomain.com and wordpress blog on mydomain.com/blog If I have a link to a specific product on my blog and user goes to the product on the store, will bounce rate increase or as it's the same domain will be like a new page view? Different CMS's and blog is on a different analytics account than the store. I hope i could explain myself! Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | prozis0 -
Google Analytics Stopped Tracking Visits - NEED HELP!
Hi Moz Community, I have about 10 sites, static HTML sites and WordPress sites, which ALL stopped tracking Google Analytics on August 2nd. They go to a flat-line! Dead! No data! Has anyone else experienced this either currently or before? I have confirmed all code is correct as it's been tracking these sites for years. One site gets 5,000+ visits a month and they are sitting at only 1,500 now and will be a fun conversation to have with the client. If all code is correct, what should I do? How do I overcome this without having to re-create another account/tracking ID? Never dealt with something like this before and there is not much on the web or in other forums. Would appreciate any help or advice or tips! - Patrick
Reporting & Analytics | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
An overnight substantial drop in visit duration while amount of sessions grew.
Hi, My Ave. session duration has dropped from 2:10 to 0:14 overnight. At the same time, amount of sessions from all channels grew on average of 56%. This increased (and I guess low quality) traffic is coming in from multiple regions, languages, devices and channels. I was not able to pin point it to 1 source, location, landing page etc. See enclosed screen shot. I would appreciate if anyone can shed some light on what's wrong and if there are any SEO implications. Thanks. pxWQX2E.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Amis0 -
Ok. I'm just going to cut loose with my stupid question. What is internal link equity? What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity?
What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity? Is there a limit to how many of these I want? What's the rule-of-thumb? Cheers, Wes
Reporting & Analytics | | wrconard0 -
Does GWT "Fetch as Google Bot" feature affect crawl rate?
Hello Mozians, I have noticed many people saying using GWT fetch as GoogleBot can affect your crawl rate in future, if used regularly. Though, i am not very sure if this is true or just another stale SEO myth. As currently GWT provides a limit of 500 URLs to fetch every month. I hope my doubts will be cleared by the Moz community experts. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pushkar630 -
Sort referring sites by visit change over time comparison in GA
I can't believe I've never done this before, so I'm going to assume that I previously must have figured it out via excel, but I'm hoping there's an easier way. So I want to compare the referring sites between April and May and see which have sent (specifically) less traffic. The problem with doing a comparison in GA is that it only sorts by the highest traffic for May, when actually I want to see the largest negative change (by number, not percentage) between April and May. Is there a way to do this via the dashboard or am I just going to have to play about in excel for 10 minutes?
Reporting & Analytics | | StalkerB0 -
Site: Query Question
Hi All, Question around the site: query you can execute on Google for example. Now I know it has lots of inaccuracies, but I like to keep a high level sight of it over time. I was using it to also try and get a high level view of how many product pages were indexed vs. the total number of pages. What is interesting is when I do a site: query for say www.newark.com I get ~748,000 results returned. When I do a query for www.newark.com "/dp/" I get ~845,000 results returned. Either I am doing something stupid or these numbers are completely backwards? Any thoughts? Thanks, Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | BenRush0