How To Calculate How Much Money Is Left On The Table

Coin Left on the Table

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Originally written past Analytics Demystified on June 28, 2010

(Estimated Time to Read this Mail = three.5 Minutes)

Imagine that you lot are in a retail shop and y'all catch a bunch of items, bring them up to the counter and just as you are almost to pay, you decide to push button a few of the items off to the side and not include them as part of your purchase. While this may non happen also often in existent life, information technology happens quite often in eCommerce. If you are a retail website, these discarded items can add upwardly quickly! In this post, I am going to testify y'all how to quantify how much coin yous are leaving on the table. For those not involved in a Retail site, I volition also practise my best to show how this concept tin can be applied to non-Retail sites.

The Standard Cart Process
So before we get to the more advanced stuff, let'southward brand certain we are all on the aforementioned page when it comes to the eCommerce shopping cart process. Normally, here'due south how it works:

Visitors view products on your website and you capture this with a Product View Success Issue and shop the products viewed in the Products Variable.
At some point, visitors add together items to the shopping cart and you lot prepare the Cart Add Success Event and the Products Variable with the product ID or name(s).
Hopefully, visitors go to the Checkout Page and y'all ready the Checkout Success Event and the Products Variable with the Product ID or name(s).
Finally, the order is completed and yous set the Purchase Success Event which sets the Orders, Units and Revenue Success Events for each Product purchased.

Hopefully this is straightforward and if you sell online yous have successfully implemented these steps on your site. If so, you are set to take things to the next level and do some stuff that is not traditionally done equally part of standard eCommerce implementations.

How Much $$$ Left on the Table?
Every bit the post name implies, in this scenario nosotros would like to see how much $$$ we are losing online by website visitors leaving items in their Cart. If you recollect back to the initial scenario above, this is equivalent to the Retail store adding up how much they could accept made that twenty-four hour period if no 1 had left stuff on the counter when they were checking out. In addition to seeing how much $$$ is being missed out on, the store owner would probably desire to know what products are being left to see if at that place are any patterns he/she could place. For example, information technology may be the case that items over $100 are left more than often than products nether $100, etc…

Well the good news, is that if y'all are doing business online, this much easier and yous tin can see a lot more data on the items being abandoned and those who abandon them. So here's how you do it:

When a website visitor adds one or more than products to the shopping cart, in addition to setting the Cart Add together Success Event (scAdd), you should set a currency Incrementer Event with the dollar amount associated with the items added. Every bit a refresher, an Incrementer Event allows yous to pass in a numeric/currency value to a Success Event instead of using it as a counter. By passing in the amount associated with the items added the Cart, you volition take a new metric which represents the total potential that you could take fabricated had no i left anything in the cart. I call this new metric $$$ Added to Cart.

Once this is washed, you can compare this "$$$ Added to Cart" metric with your Acquirement metric, either in a conversion funnel report or in a normal Conversion Variable (eVar) written report by creating a Calculated Metric dividing the 2 metrics to see what % of $$$ Added to Cart turns into Revenue.

If you lot desire to be even more particular, you can set some other incrementer consequence with the $$$ that the company has in the Cart at the time of Checkout. However, if you lot find that you lot don't take much loss between Cart Add and Checkout or between Checkout and Purchase, this may prove to be unnecessary.
Finally, since you are setting the Products variable with the Cart Add upshot already, when you lot compare these two metrics, you can easily break it downward by Product (or whatever other eVar variables you have prepare previously).

Across Retail
Equally promised, I wanted to touch upon a few ways you could use this same concept if you manage a non-Retail website. Here are a few that come to mind:

On a Fiscal Services site, laissez passer in the total loan amount a person is requesting and compare that to how much they are eventually loaned.
On a Media site, pass in the total amount of advertising your site could accept earned if all ads were clicked.
On an Motorcar site, pass in the full value of cars visitors configure to meet your max potential.
On a Lead Generation site, pass in a value for ever visitor who starts completing a lead form.
On a Travel site, pass in the total value of trips planned online and compare information technology to the amount actually booked.
On a Manufacturing site, laissez passer in the full Bill of Materials value the visitor has added.

Equally you can encounter, the concept of seeing what your high-end potential is and comparing information technology to actual operation tin can be practical to almost any website and gives you another data point for comparison. I like using this metric amend than Visits or Unique Visitors since information technology is not realistic that you are going to catechumen every person who comes to your site. Even so, in one case a company takes some more deliberate deportment, they are self-qualifying themselves, and therefore, capturing their potential revenue streams gives yous a high, but realistic goal to strive for and a KPI that you can use to see how you are doing over time.

Last Thoughts
And so there you take it. Just a quick, easy manner to add together some more data to your all-important shopping cart process. In general, I feel like Incrementer success events are under-utilized by SiteCatalyst users so hopefully this example helps to get your mind working in new and inventive ways to use them…

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