Transactions v Goal Conversions
GA specific, General web analytics, Urchin software specific October 23rd, 2007When viewing Google Analytics reports, I constantly need to remind myself of the difference between goals and conversions (may be its just me that gets confused..!). Whatever, I thought I would share my clarification.
One obvious difference is that a transaction is associated with an e-commerce completion (a purchase) while a goal conversion is considered a non-ecommerce conversion, such as a PDF download, a form completion or visit to a special offers page. Of course they are all conversions, which is where I think confusion lies.
Explanation: The most important difference as far as Google Analytics is concerned, is that a conversion can only happen once during a visitor session - that is, a visitor can only become a customer (convert) once and that makes sense. However, if one of your goals is set to *.pdf for example (any PDF file download), then should a visitor download 5 PDF files during their session, it will only show as one conversion in your Goal Conversion reports. Assuming you are tracking pdf downloads, the 5 PDF files will of course show in your Content > Top Content report.
Tip: Track conversions as if transactions
For sites that contain many types of file downloads and/or you use wildcards in your goal configuration, tracking the number of conversions can be misleading - as in the PDF example above. For this scenario, you could enable pseudo e-commerce tracking - that is, track a conversion as if it was a product transaction. In that way, each download/goal is considered a transaction which may be more relevant than tracking a visitor conversion.
Consider also the standard goal value assignment within the GA configuration that allows you to monetise goals. This is very useful, however the same value is set for all conversions. The pseudo e-commerce method overcomes this limitation as each download can be monetised differently, just like a product purchase.
The article - Monetizing Non-Ecommerce Sites is listed on the Conversion University web site.
Was this article helpful or is it just me that needs reminding of the Transactions v Goal Conversions difference? Share our thoughts by adding a comment.
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October 26th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Hey Brian,
It’s funny, I was discussing a different aspect of this GoalCR vs. TransactionCR distinction with a customer just the other day.
In our case in point, the goal URL was the “thank you” page on which the eCommerce code was also placed. The customer was bewildered as he couldn’t understand how the two conversion rates could possibly be different (the Goal CR was always 2-3% higher than the transaction CR).
Looking at the source code, the GA page tag was at the end of the header (which will generate a goal conversion), whereas the __utmsettrans() was called only once the whole body had loaded (which will record the transaction)
So the 2-3% difference simply represented the proportion of visitors who left the page AFTER the header loading, but BEFORE it had fully loaded to the very end of the body.
Now that I’ve told this story, I’m kinda realizing that it’s only very loosely related to the topic of your post, but what the hell, I’m going to post it anyway
October 26th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Hi Alan - I would say your comment is related. Essentially this post is all about how numbers can get mis-interpreted if you don’t know the full facts of your tool or its implementation. Stone Temple Consulting published a recent study on how the position of page tag code effects visitor numbers: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/analytics-report-august-2007.shtml
Also, look out for a whitepaper I am about to publish on the inherent inaccuracies of web analytics tools..
January 18th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Excuse me for asking a silly question. In Table 1.2: The economic effect of a 1% increase in conversion rate
what is meant by Cost per visit? There is no cost, only salary for the SEO, so how should I recalculate then? Great blog.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Hi Marcis - which page/Table 1.2 are you referring to?
In terms of costs, if you are measuring the number of organic visitors to your site from SEO efforts and you know the cost/salary of your SEO’er, simply divide one by the other.
Whether the SEO is done in-house or via an agency does not matter in this. You can still calculate how much an organic visitor is costing you.
HTH, Brian