Checkout Engagement Rate indicates how healthy your cart or shopping bag page is. More shoppers start the checkout process proportionally more of them will complete the purchase.
A low Checkout Engagement Rate is not an automatic “score-killer” because this metric contains noise created by eCommerce sites that automatically move shopper to the cart page as soon as they add product to the cart. This inflates the number of sessions that can start the checkout process and artificially reduces the checkout engagement rate.
How checkout engagement rate is tracked and calculated?
With Checkout Zen™, an application that natively integrates into eCommerce platforms, we are avoiding inconsistencies of conventional web analytics solutions, like Google Analytics and others, where merchants need to custom tag online cart events. As results we are able to benchmark KPIs across all merchant sites and score the performance of the individual eCommerce sites.
Checkout Engagement Rate is calculated as a ratio between visitors who started the checkout process after reaching cart page with at least one product in the online shopping cart.
The following is a simple formula that explains how this metric is calculated:
What you can analyze and learn about your checkout engagement rate?
Checkout Zen™ is an easy to use checkout analytics app for your eCommerce site that enables you to detect trends and anomalies of this metric together with the ability to action those findings to improve your own results.
Trend Analysis
eCommerce metrics fluctuate, often in very significant way, during different day parts, days in week, weeks in the month, and months in the year. Therefore, it is essential to always consider the time varying behavior of the results in addition to the most reading.
Device Analysis
Cart abandonment rate is different for visitors using different web enabled devices. Interpretation of these results creates two sided picture. On one side a device form factor can be used as a proxy attribute for the audience type. On the other side a significantly higher cart abandonment rate on a particular device can also be indicator of poor checkout experience on such device.
New vs. Returning Visitor Analysis
Behavior of new site visitors tends to be different from the behavior of the returning visitors. New visitors in general are more sensitive to nuances of onsite experience than returning visitors. The ultimate goal is to minimize cart abandonment rate for the new visitors.
Channel Analysis
Cart abandonment rate is significantly impacted by the quality of visitor traffic, i.e. product-visitor fit. Channel analysis enables comparisons of the cart abandonment rate across main marketing channels and it can help business executives and marketing team members more effectively allocated marketing spend.
Sources Analysis
Traffic source analysis of the cart abandonment rate increases the resolution of the more general channel analysis into detail sources of the web traffic. Similar to channel analysis the results of sources analysis are essential tools for more effective management of the marketing spend.
Exit Page Analysis
Knowledge about where shoppers are exiting the site helps with better understanding of what causes high cart abandonment rate. For example those who are leaving site on home or category pages, i.e. exit points at the top of the sales funnel, are most likely leaving because they did not commit to purchase yet. Those who abandon carts at the bottom of the checkout are most likely frustrated with the checkout experience.
NOTE: The following is the formula behind the cart abandonment rate analysis by exit page template:
Multi-Attribute Analysis
Checkout Zen™ charts enable a multi-attribute filtering and deep data analysis for cart abandonment rate.