A goal funnel can be thought of similar to a funnel you might use to pour gasoline into your lawn mower. The analogy to the shopping cart is visitors enter the large end of the funnel and you hope they will exit out the other end of the funnel by making a purchase. If we record all of the visitors that enter the funnel and those that exit the funnel at the other end – we can calculate a conversion rate. Every visitor that entered the funnel but did not make a purchase can be thought of as funnel leakage. You ideally want to establish baseline measurements prior to making changes to your shopping cart.  Next, you make the changes and then observe the results.

Google Analytics provides for the creation of  goals and also provides for Funnel Visualization. The following graphic depicts a real goal funnel. The example goal funnel begins when a customer adds an item to their shopping cart, the next step in the funnel is when they depress the checkout button. The final step is the customer receiving a thank you page after a success sale.

The question of the day is – how can we reduce funnel leakage? Amazon.com is one of the worlds most successful ecommerce sites and so there is value in observing what they have done to reduce funnel leakage. Upon examination, Amazon removes virtually all other links that could distract a potential buyer as they complete the purchase process.

Mainstream IT has developed a custom module for the Lite Commerce shopping cart that removes all of the distracting links once the checkout process is initiated.

How do you reduce funnel leakage on your shopping cart?

There is a great deal of discussion these days related to cloud computing. Amazons cloud computing environment is one of the more mature offerings available at this time.

The Tarzan PHP toolkit is designed to communicate with Amazon’s web services. There are alternative PHP packages that can communicate with AWS.  At the time of this writing I believe that Tarzan offers the most complete PHP implementation. Tarzan is free, open-source software with a BSD license.

The following Amazon Web Services are supported by Tarzan:

S3: Simple Storage Service

Cloudfront: Content Delivery Network

SIMPLEDB

SQS: Simple Queue Service

EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud

AAWS: Amazon Associates Web Service

The latest version of Tarzan is version 2.0.3 and was released on 28 February 2009.

You can learn more about Tarzan by visiting the following link:

Tarzan AWS Site

What toolkit do you use to communicate with AWS?

This article will describe the necessary steps to setup Google Optimizer for use with the Lite Commerce shopping Cart. In this example we will assume the following:

1. The shopping cart has already been instrumented with Google Analytics

2. Lite Commerce version 2.2 is installed

3. The Lite Commerce HTML catalog is installed and enabled.

4. A Google Optimizer A/B Experiment is being setup

In the typical Lite Commerce installation that uses the HTML catalog, the index.php file that is in the web server document root directory contains a redirect to the index.html file that is located in the catalog directory. The following is an example of the document root index.php file:

<?php
header('Location: ./' . 'shop/catalog/index.html');
?>

In the example A/B Experiment, we desire to use the standard HTML catalog index.html page for our A experiment and an entirely different homepage for the B component of our experiment. We will also setup a goal page so that we can use Google Optimizer to determine if the A or B homepage leads to more sales conversions.

In order to use Google Optimizer you must have a Google account and must sign into Google Optimizer. The process of setting up a Google Optimizer experiment is beyond the scope of this article.

We next need to configure the original index.html file in the catalog directory. In order to configure the index.html file, we need to add two javascript snippets to the file. If we add the javascript to this file, the changes will be overwritten each time a new HTML catalog is created. In order to circumvent this issue, we made a copy of the index.html file in the catalog directory and named it index1.html. We then edited index1.html and added the two javascript snippets to this file. This solution will require the same process to be repeated anytime the HTML catalog is recreated. After creating the index1.html page we need to modify the original index.php file as follows:

<?php
header('Location: ./' . 'shop/catalog/index1.html');
?>

We create the B part of the experiment by creating an alternate homepage by naming it index2.html and placing the file in the document root directory. After index2.html is created the Google Optimizer javascript must be added just before the closing body tag ( e.g. </body> ).

The final task is to determine the Lite Commerce goal page. The best goal page would be the “Thank You” page that is displayed after a successful purchase. You can use the following url for the conversion page:

https://your domain and path to the shopping cart directory/cart.php?target=checkoutSuccess

For example: https://www.mainstreamit.com/shop/cart.php?target=checkoutSuccess

Since the Lite Commerce shopping cart is template driven, we will need to add the Google Optimizer javascript to the Lite Commerce file named main.tpl. The javascript must only be displayed if the checkoutSuccess dialog is displayed. Here is an example:

{if:target=#checkoutSuccess#}
<script>
if(typeof(urchinTracker)!='function')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="'+
'http'+(document.location.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+
'.google-analytics.com/urchin.js'+'"></sc'+'ript>')
</script>
<script>
_uacct = 'UA-xxcxxcx-x';
urchinTracker("/xxxxxxxxxx/goal");
</script>
{end:}
</body>

This completes the process of enabling Lite Commerce to use Google Optimizer.

Happy experimenting!

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