3 Key Google Analytics Ecommerce Reports – Part III

Natacha Kenol - July 23, 2015

In the final part of this blog series, we will review the Time to Purchase report. This report displays the numbers of days and the number of sessions it takes customers to complete purchasing decisions.

#3: Time to Purchase

The Days to Transaction and Sessions to Transaction tabs show the average number of days and sessions from the first website interaction to purchase. This helps you understand how long it takes someone to buy from your website and whether that behavior is different across different segments of your website customers.

For example, in Figures 1 and 2, you can see that 92% of people convert in two sessions or less and most of them (77%) on the same day! This leaves an opportunity to convert those users who do not purchase in the first two sessions. This would require you to dig one level deeper however – and brings us to segmenting!

Figure 1

Figure 2

To add even more value, you can segment your data. For example, you can segment by month and get a trend of the data and see whether you are improving or getting worse over time, be it year-over-year or month-over-month. You can then also segment by your marketing efforts to see which paid campaigns or other digital strategies (organic, social, etc.) are getting the best ROI.

For example, in Figure 3 paid traffic is showing a slightly higher percentage of total transactions conducted after the user visits the site for the first time in Q1 2015 versus Q1 2014. Comparatively, as shown in Figure 4, most people convert after the first session and the percentage year-over-year has slightly increased. In this case, we would want a higher percentage of total transactions and sessions taking place after the first time the user visits the site. Perhaps, better content on the product pages targeted to different segments could help boost that percentage? On the other hand, if the data had indicated that the purchase behavior was long, stretched out over numerous days and sessions, you could provide more content since visitors seem to want more information before making a decision.

Figure 3

Figure 4

As you start to better understand customer behavior along their purchasing path, you can implement better marketing initiatives for the different segments of your website customers.

Now that you have more knowledge on Ecommerce reports and the value that they can add to your Analytics, we wish you happy analyzing!