X-Cart:Tracking shopping cart abandonment with Google Analytics

A few words on Google Analytics "Goals" and "Goal Funnels"

One of the major concerns for many e-commerce site owners is shopping cart abandonment: in many cases, a potential buyer adds an item to their shopping cart but does not make it to the end of checkout process. Well, cart abandonment may happen for a variety of reasons. You do not have to be alarmed each time a visitor leaves your site without completing a purchase: anyone can change their mind and decide not to buy; we all do that sometimes. However, it is a good idea to know shopping cart abandonment rate for your site, because, if this rate is too high, it most certainly indicates that some part of checkout process on your site needs more of your attention.

A great tool for measuring your site's shopping cart abandonment rate is Google Analytics. Google Analytics can give you valuable insight into your visitors' behavior by using two powerful features: Goals and Goal Funnels. Goals and Goal Funnels are a versatile way to measure how well your site fulfills your target business objectives. A Goal is a combination of a business objective and a measurable action performed by your website's visitors. With respect to your e-commerce site, the main business objective for you is to gain revenue, whereas the measurable action your customer needs to take in order for you to gain revenue is complete a purchase, the success measure for which is the customer's visit to the Thank you for your purchase page. Completing a purchase in an X-Cart based store involves a few steps like adding an item to the shopping cart, choosing a shipping method, providing your billing address, providing your shipping address, choosing a payment method and providing your payment information. This sequence of steps that lead your visitor up to successfully completing a purchase is your Goal Funnel.

You can find more information on Goals and Goal Funnels in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Setting up a Goal and a Goal Funnel to track shopping cart abandonment on your store site

Below we will discuss how you can set up a Goal and a Funnel in your Google Analytics account to track shopping cart abandonment in your X-Cart based store. This will give you a better clue on where and why your customers may drop off during checkout: whether it’s overall checkout user experience (for instance, more information needed for each of the steps) or specific checkout options (shipping rates too high, not happy with available payment/shipping options, etc).

The instruction below assumes that X-Cart has been installed off your website root to a directory titled "xcart".

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account at https://www.google.com/analytics/.
2. Select the account that contains the profile in which you will be creating a Goal:
   • Click the Admin tab at the top right of any screen in Analytics.
   • If you are not already on the Account Administration screen, click on the Account list link at top left, just below the orange bar.
   • Click on the name of the account and then the name of the property you want to add a Goal to. If you have a lot of accounts or properties, use the drop down search box in the top right of the menu bar and type to search.
3. Under the Profile tab, find the profile for which you will be creating a Goal and click on its name.
4. Click the Goals tab.
5. Click +Goal to add the goal to one of the available four Goal sets (Each set can contain up to five goals).
6. Use the section 'General Information' to provide info about the Goal you are creating:
   • Enter a Goal Name so you can quickly recognize the Goal when viewing reports.
   • Select Active if you want the Goal to apply as soon as you create and save it. Select Inactive if you want to create the Goal without applying it to your account.
     You can change this selection at any time to pause and reactivate a Goal.
   • Select the Goal Type: The four goal types supported by Google Analytics are URL Destination, Visit Duration, Page/Visit and Event. The one you need is URL Destination (It is the only goal type that works well combined with a Goal Funnel).
7. Once you select the radio button for URL Destination, a section titled 'Goal Details' will appear. In this section, provide the following values:
   • Goal URL: Enter your Goal URL as /xcart/cart.php?mode=order_message.
     Remember that here we are assuming that X-Cart has been installed off your website root in a directory titled "xcart".
   • Match Type: Select Head Match.
   • Case sensitive: Leave the checkbox empty.
   • Goal value: Enter your goal value or leave empty.
8. In the 'Goal Funnel' section, select the Use funnel checkbox.
9. Enter the steps for your Goal Funnel:
   • Step 1:
     

   URL: /xcart/cart.php

   Name: Shopping cart (Don't set it as a required first step because customers might bypass it by clicking on “Checkout” in the small shopping cart)

   • Step 2:
     

   URL: /xcart/cart.php?mode=checkout

   Name: Start checkout

10. ...
11. Save the new goal. Please note that data will not be available in your Google Analytics reports until the following day.