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Days & Visits to Goal Completion: The Journey of Your Customers

November 27, 2010 | Written by Dusty Dean

Visits to Purchase

You learn very quickly in the world of Web analytics to never trust a lone metric. Advance segmentation and comparison give context that leads to actionable insight and analysis.

Well-designed websites have macro and micro conversion goals that represent actions that are valuable to your company.

It’s exciting to look at your KPI 1 dashboard and see the numbers of completed macro and micro conversions, but this only gives you a tiny snapshot of your conversion goal analysis.

Most website visitors don’t convert on their first visit. It often takes subsequent visits to complete conversion goals.

What if you could determine the number of days it takes a visitor to complete one of your conversion goals? What if you could see the number of website visits it takes for your visitor to convert?

Fortunately, you can! You can access your “Days to Goal Completion” or “Visits to Goal Competition” report in your Web analytics platform.

In Google Analytics, with e-commerce tracking activated, this will appear as “Days to Purchase” and “Visits to Purchase”.

Additionally, in Google Analytics, the word purchase can represent any goal you’ve configured for your website. A PDF download, video watched, or form submission can be tracked the same way. You’re not confined to just e-commerce purchases, which is good news for tracking micro conversions.

This valuable insight helps you determine if your visitors are quickly converting; or taking too long to complete your conversion goals.

If they are taking too long to convert (several days & visits) then you can focus on offering better product/service descriptions, more prominent testimonials and clearer call-to-actions (CTAs).

Conversely, if they’re converting quickly then you can use A/B testing to see if a higher price will convert at the same rate.

Knowing the journey your customers take to complete your conversion goals will help your company increase the ROI of their Web marketing efforts and create solutions that can be used across other marketing channels.

Notes:

  1. KPI (Key Performance Indicators) – Quantitative and qualitative measures of success used to determine if your company is meeting its strategic goals. ↩
November 27, 2010 | Written by Dusty Dean

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