If you want to know why they may be abandoning on Paypal’s site, go through Paypal’s process and take notes on all the possible reasons someone would leave. You may be able to address some of the problems on your site before they get to Paypal by making sure they don’t have any unanswered questions. Examples – return policy, shipping costs, gift wrapping, etc.

I referred to “event tracking” as a way to measure how many people click on a specific link, in your case the Paypal button on a page. This will be able to measure how many people are going to Paypal, but once they are on Paypal’s site you will not be able to know what they do there.

Good luck to you Simon.

Thanks for your reply.

Do you mean the add to cart button on our site ?
I think you are saying that this will tell me how many people add something to their cart, and I then deduct this # from my total # of sales to get the abandonment rate. Is that right ?

The problem with this is I have no way of finding out why they abandoned the cart if I cannot track the four or five steps in the 3rd party PayPal checkout. Is there a way round this ?

Thanks
Simon

Google recently created the ability to track “events” on a given page. In your case you would make the click of your Paypal button the event you want to track. Good luck to you.

Great questions! There are no published benchmarks for this metric. If you order acquisition gap is negative then you better have a long life time value for that customer, because one order does not make up the amount you paid to drive them to your site. As far a if it should be unique or just visits; depends on your organization and the rest of your metrics. You should be consistent across all metrics.

Improving conversion rate does indeed improve this metric as they are mathematically inverse. However, taking that one shortcut while explaining this ratio would have ignored our marketing expenses. We don’t want to take the money out of our explanation because it gives us other useful metrics like Cost per Order and Cost per Visitor with which other metrics like Order Acquisition Gap can be calculated. Thank you for reading and commenting.

In other words, if you have a 4% conversion rate, you have a 25 OAR (1/0.04), correct?

Mathematically, you have marketing expense in the numerator and denominator of your equation. By default, marketing expense cancels out, leaving you with the inverse of conversion rate.

So by default, improving conversion rate improves this metric!

I strongly recommend investing time into gaining an understanding of how to analyze your site or working with someone who does. Here is a great place for you to start educating yourself in understanding Google Analytics.

Best of luck to you.

Web Analytics programs allow you to segment your traffic by the sources that deliver it. You should make sure that you have an analytics program running on your site. You can always use Google Analytics it’s free, or use a paid service like Omniture.

If you are talking about tracking offline marketing efforts then you may have to implement a question on your site or make assumptions based on short term questionnaires to find out where your visitors are originating from.