Tracking repeat cart visitors

In the WA yahoogroup, Smith had an interesting problem.

His website has setup a mechanism to retain items in cart for a period of 30 days and whenever the person who added these to carts returns to the site, he sees the previously placed item in the cart. Smith wants to know how he can track the effectiveness of this feature.

Here is my solution to his problem:

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There are two ways to do this:

WAY 1: WITHOUT SETTING UP ADDITIONAL TRACKING CODE, ONE CAN GET A VERY GOOD APPROXIMATION.

(1) Depending on the WA tool that you are using, you need to have a way to IDENTIFY cart additions
e.g:
Look at the URL when someone adds to cart - On most sites it is like http://......./addtocart.html/aspx.

{Get the page name and look at number of visits to that - This will be the metric cart additions}

(2) create a VISITOR/COOKIE LEVEL SEGMENT for all the folks that added to cart (using the page key above)

Above will help us track all the cookies that have added to cart.

(3) create a derived metric based on purchase_visits.
purchase_visits {Visit_seq_num > 1} - This is possible in Discover OnPremise.

Combine 2 and 3 in a workspace/report - You have your metric.

WAY 2: WITH ADDITIONAL SITE TAGGING
Your website already can identify returning visitors and show them what is in the cart. For these have a tagging mechanism by way of code in the add to cart page that sends specific tagging information to the WA tool.
e.g: this could be through a URL parameter called return_to_cart

Next use your custom report formats in Yahoo Analytics, Google Analytics, Omniture to see the visits and purchase_visits for this parameter return_to_cart

That should give you the answer - There is nothing in the world of tracking WA that is not trackable :)

Thanks
Kiran
rkirana@gmail.com
Web Analytics Consultant
http://webanalyticsnuggets.blogspot.com/

- On Thu, 30/4/09, tlsmith1260 wrote:


From: tlsmith1260
Subject: [webanalytics] Tracking conversion in shopping cart with item retention
To: webanalytics@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, 30 April, 2009, 10:31 PM

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So Mr SMith, you are on the right track.

Customization and personalization form the backbone of Web 2.0
You are on the right track!!