Web Analytics Blog
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Whats Your PayPal Completion Rate?
I am currently working with a client who use PayPal as their payment service provider. God I hate 3rd party PSPs. - don't they make life difficult? We've been tracking shopping cart abandonment over time but have been unable to set up a full conversion funnel analysis because only a very small proportion of purchasers click the return button on the payment successful page with in the PayPal domain and return to the site.
We had suspicions that the shopping cart abandonment rate was much higher than the industry average - Fireclick estimate this to be between 66 and 82%. But couldn't get a handle on what was happening on the PayPal payment page itself. Searching for "PayPal abandonment rates" on Google failed to come up with any useful figures. Does anybody else have estimates? PayPal aren't saying.
To begin payment on the site shoppers must click on a "buy now" button (Flash) which takes them to the payment page. We obviously know the number of completed purchses. So we could have used Google's Analytics New Flash Tracking to count the number of times users clicked on Buy Now. Luckily before I got the developers to do this somebody discovered that the back office system tracked all transactions started as well as completed - presumably as the system needs to pass on order details to PayPal. So in the end it was easy - PayPal abandonment is simply the percentage difference between the number of started transactions and the number of completed transactions.
In fact our PayPal Completion Rate was very close to the Fireclick Average for Fashion & Apparel average of between 18 and 32%.
We had suspicions that the shopping cart abandonment rate was much higher than the industry average - Fireclick estimate this to be between 66 and 82%. But couldn't get a handle on what was happening on the PayPal payment page itself. Searching for "PayPal abandonment rates" on Google failed to come up with any useful figures. Does anybody else have estimates? PayPal aren't saying.
To begin payment on the site shoppers must click on a "buy now" button (Flash) which takes them to the payment page. We obviously know the number of completed purchses. So we could have used Google's Analytics New Flash Tracking to count the number of times users clicked on Buy Now. Luckily before I got the developers to do this somebody discovered that the back office system tracked all transactions started as well as completed - presumably as the system needs to pass on order details to PayPal. So in the end it was easy - PayPal abandonment is simply the percentage difference between the number of started transactions and the number of completed transactions.
In fact our PayPal Completion Rate was very close to the Fireclick Average for Fashion & Apparel average of between 18 and 32%.
Labels: abandonment, completion, google analytics, paypal, rates
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