Recently I was talking to a friend who was asking about my post on buyer versus order conversion rates I posted recently. We had been talking about the “every session is an opportunity to convert” mantra that some folks push as gospel; his comment to me was funny. He basically said, “I manage analytics for a company that does over $100 million annually through our online channel and that type of thinking is [crap].”

I told him to tell me how he really felt.

After he read my post he said he’d started calculating the delta between buyer and order conversion rates for his own site on both a daily and monthly basis; he’d been calculating both buyer and order conversion rates as part of his daily KPI set but hadn’t really thought about the difference between them. While he wasn’t surprised to see an average of six to eight percent difference on a daily basis, he was surprised to see that on a monthly basis his order (visit-based) conversion rate was, on average, twenty-seven percent lower than his buyer (visitor-based) conversion rate!

Put another way, by subscribing to the “only use visits to calculate conversion” methodology my friend would be under-reporting the likelihood that he would sell products to real people on a monthly basis by nearly one-third!

So he got me thinking, I wonder what the monthly delta is between buyer and order conversion rates (BOCR Delta) is for book sales on my web site. Have a look:

Aside from the fact that conversion is off slightly over the past few months, likely owing to the fact that I’ve stepped up my efforts to bring traffic to the web site, you can see that I have much the same problem as my friend on a monthly basis. Were I to rely on visit-based conversion rates alone, my understanding of how real people purchase on my web site would be incomplete.

Anyway, I stand by my original statement, you need both visit- and visitor-based conversion rates to understand how your audience converts. Both metrics tell you something valuable; one tells you about the person doing the converting, the other tells you about the process.

I welcome your comments on this subject. Perhaps you disagree with me? Or perhaps you agree but are having a hard time calculating one or the other rates using your web analytics application?

Thanks to some anonymous poster to my weblog, you can now view my Emetrics presentation on the Web Analytics Business Process over on slideshare or use the following embedded object (how cool!)

[I had to remove the object since it was breaking my site … sorry!]

I’m nearly done with the annotated version but it’s been slow going because work has been really busy lately. Keep watching this weblog!

Yes, I have not completely forgotten and last night I made some progress! You can now sign-up to join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group on my web site. Once enough folks indicate/reiterate their intent to participate I’ll schedule a Skypecast and we’ll get the party started.

In the meantime, I wanted to start a list of “suggested readings” on the subject and would love your comments on what should be included. I have a handful of items bookmarked — blog posts, articles, reports of the “death of the web page”, and the such — but I’d love your collective feedback on what has already been written that feels important to the subject. Comment me your URLs and I’ll add them to the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group sign-up page.

June Li was having trouble downloading my presentation on the Web Analytics Business Process in Firefox. Has anyone else noticed that? I’ll try and get the file in a zipped format in the next few days to save folks time downloading.

June had a great suggestion for companies just getting started with explicitly considering how web analytics creates value inside their organizations. She commented that instead of going directly to digital flowcharting that she’s had success with “yellow stickies“. Posted on a wall or roll of paper, the stickies promote rapid planning and iteration while the organization carefully maps decision points, events, tasks and sub-tasks. Then, when stakeholders are comfortable with the process and integration points for web analytics, the stickies can be transferred into digital format for widespread discussion and distribution.

An excellent suggestion. Thanks June!

At Emetrics I unfortunately had to miss Jim Sterne’s keynote speech. When I got to the conference people had these little cameras and they kept walking up behind me and taking pictures. Well, this made me feel a little self-conscious so I asked … apparently Jim Sterne had told people to take pictures of my pony-tail.

I suspect this was in reference to all that Fred McMurry baloney from earlier this year when a Visual Sciences competitor posted under a lame pseudonym spreading obvious lies about my person and offering $325 to anyone who would cut off my hair … while I liked the biblical allusion to Sampson I’m always wary when someone threatens me with physical harm.

Call me crazy.

Regardless, there are some funny pictures of the back of my head showing up on the Internet. Since I’m pretty close to taking “Fred” up on his offer for the money and cutting my hair do donate to Locks of Love, I suppose these shots will help me tell the inevitable “back when I had hair” stories that my kids will have to hear as I age.

If you are reading this and took some pictures at Emetrics (not just of my hair), push them to Flickr and tell me where they are in the comments to this post and I’ll blog about them later.