Viewing your Sales Cycle in Google Analytics

Every website owner using Google Analytics has access to two unique reports that can display an insight into the sales cycle of your online business. These reports are called the Visits to Purchase and the Days to Purchase reports, and they are found within the Ecommerce report section. You will find the reports at the very bottom of the navigation menu (the last two reports in the Ecommerce section).

As you can see in the screen-shot below, a horizontal bar graph represents the number of visits it takes users to purchase an item from a particular website’s shopping cart within a given date range. While most visitors on this particular website purchased something after 1 visit (17.93% of all purchases), there are many other groupings of visits that have contributed revenue and transactions for this website, including the group all the way toward the bottom of the screenshot (201+ Visits, 14.32%).

Days to Purchase in Google Analytics

You can use this data to learn more about your customers’ behavior online, specifically, when they are on your website and purchasing something from your Ecommerce system. Is your website able to turn sales around in fewer or greater visits? Does it take many days (weeks or possibly months) before customers buy something from you? Have you applied an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics and compared segments, such as New vs. Returning?

Using this data can help your marketing and website optimization efforts as you learn about your website’s sales cycle. Most website owners would love it if every visitor converted on their first visit, but that isn’t always going to be the case. The easier, more competitive, and user-friendly your website is, the faster someone will become a customer of yours.