[thelist] Sales and Visits

Lee Kowalkowski lee.kowalkowski at googlemail.com
Tue Jun 1 15:59:14 CDT 2010


On 1 June 2010 19:19, Fred Jones <fredthejonester at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have here a chart http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcpssp27_0gpcvjjck
> showing how many sales a certain site made over the past few months.
> They sell web hosting so it shouldn't be a seasonal type of thing.

I wasn't aware that the web hosting business was unaffected by
seasonal influences or trends.  I say unaware, I must admit I'm
completely ignorant on this matter.  I would be interested to learn
that there is typically no seasonal effect at all.

> Column B is the actual sales, Column C is how many Visits according to
> Google Analytics. I made Column D "Sales * 50" so that it's close to
> Column C just for comparison purposes. Then the graph is basically C
> and D.
>
> It would appear from this that there is virtually no correlation
> between C and D.
>
> Of course this is a fairly small sample, but still, it seems surprising, no?

I think multiplying it by 50 is just going to magnify your variances,
so you have to be mindful that the yellow line is magnified and
practically flat in comparison to the red line (it may be more helpful
to compare sales with the number of POST requests for example -
providing your site is designed in such a way that this figure will be
more indicative).  I'd stick with just looking at your conversion
rate, which is looking consistently less than 5% so far.  To be
honest, that's quite unremarkable trend-wise.  It's not like it leapt
up to 20% or anything.

Were there any changes made to the site within this time or any other
notable events?  I expect not.

You may need to study your analytics more closely to filter out any
noise, or to see what users are doing exactly, if you want a more
accurate conversion rate.

...but quarter 2 is looking a lot better than quarter 1 already!  I
suppose it depends on what you plan to do with this information, are
you just going to sit and watch for now?  A bigger sample might be
better though.  I'm guessing you don't have enough information to
start proving any experiments, unless they deliver drastic results.

-- 
Lee
www.webdeavour.co.uk


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