Comments on: Excellent Analytics Tip#5: Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices

By: Imad Mouaddine

Imad Mouaddine — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:44:37 +0000

Thanks for your post. Very interesting specially for a newbie like myself.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:19:46 +0000

Hello, since the last couple of days, for some reason my Thank You page is showing in the landing pages in GA, and is impacting dramatically one of my goals.
I can force the funnel by making the previous step mandatory, so the funnel will only record the pages that came from the previous page (and therefore not the ones where the Goal page came directly from a search result), however according to the GA help, this will not impact the Goal itself, which will continue to record all visits.

Is there anything I can do to stop this?

Thanks Avinash.

By: Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:45:45 +0000

Levi: You are right, Google Analytics, and all other web analytics tools, will behave that way. If the same person comes again and again and buys things from you each of those are counted as conversions. Because they are conversions. No?

If your business involves that happening then certainly you should be careful of this phenomenon. One alternative is to add a metric to give context, like Unique Orders Per Customer (quite easy to do in any tool with a custom report or through the API). You can also dedupe the orders by unique customer and compute conversions.

While on paper it is possible conversion rate could exceed 100%, it is rare that this happens in real life. So most of the time this kind of exercises are good for mental stimulation, but of minor, if any, practical value.

- Avinash.

By: Levi

Levi — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:06:32 +0000

If Google Analytics for instance allows visitors to convert a second time or third time on follow up visits, and unique visitors is used to calculate conversion rate, isn't it true that converion rate could exceed 100%? Would this not cause the data to be skewed if one visitor converted a bunch of times. It might give you a false sense of success or am I missing something?

By: 高超分析技巧系列之五：转化率基础和最佳实践 - 网站分析 - 从网站分析到数据挖掘 - 网络营销实践

高超分析技巧系列之五：转化率基础和最佳实践 - 网站分析 - 从网站分析到数据挖掘 - 网络营销实践 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:26:55 +0000

[...] 文/Avinash 译者/PeiPei [...]

By: Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:19:41 +0000

John: If the conversion point is one step removed, I think you can read a lot into the "landing page conversion".

But if conversion is several pages away, as is typical, conversion is not a good indicator because the subsequent pages have so much more influence weather conversions happen or not.

The more the number of pages the worse your data.

By setting up the landing page to convert (in a situation where there are many pages in between the landing page and the goal) you are placing an overwhelming burden where it might not belong (and there is a small chance you'll focus too much on the landing page rather than subsequent broken pages).

Here's my alternative: Measure the bounce rate of landing pages.

The job of landing pages is to engage people who land and stop them from leaving instantly. If the landing page gets the person to click on the right call to action it has done its job, now its up to rest of the site.

-Avinash.