Monitoring cart drop outs

[robmob]

Hi

I would like to check our recent site activity to monitor how many users are adding items to their cart but then not proceeding to checkout.

The problem is I do not know what i should really be looking at in our site stats. Can anyone point me in the right direction on this one.

Many thanks

Rob
Performancemotorcare

[jont]

If you log on to your web server by FTP and navigate to the actalog directory you will see a list of files with the extension ".session" these are simple text files that contain info such as last page visited etc, - you will need to set the owner flag to read on the file before you can read it

The actual file name eg 12z98z123z1239877.session also tells you the users IP address - replace the "z's" for "dots" ie 12.98.123.123

Your host may also include varoius stats and logging tools you can use to compare sales to views, the type of stats will vary depending on your host.

HTH

[wjcampbe]

It depends on which stats package you are using. If you have access to the raw logs, you can often open these with excel.

The add to cart and checkout items will include calls to POST with the name of the relevant perl module (ca00000x.pl, cm00000x.pl os00000x.pl - where x is the script number you are using - usually 1), so once you have the data in excel just filter the results on 'contains POST'.

hth

[dave_finlayson]

You can also include a unique image on each stage of the checkout (Act_Order00.html - Act_Order04.html) i.e cheoutstage1.gif, checkoutstage2.gif etc. You can then use your stats package to count how many times each image is viewed. This will tell you the drop off from the first to last image (the last image count should be the same as the number of orders you have had).

Expect it to be anything between 40%-60% depending on design, carriage charges etc. Working out why the figure is so high (if it is) and adjusting your site accordingly can make a big difference to sales!

Dave