By Steve Fox, Manager Solutions Architecture
steve.fox@quest.com
The ability to chart actual revenue abandoned on a eCommerce site over time is a powerful tool for not only executive dashboards, but also for making sure resources are focused on the items that most directly affect the business. This blog details the steps to set one of these types of charts up.
This is actually a Part 2 blog, since before you can chart aggregate revenue loss over time, you have to be able to extract out individual cart values from user sessions. For a discussion on how to do that, see the Part 1 blog entry: Using Regular Expressions in Foglight Experience Viewer
In that blog entry, we walked through the process of setting a session custom field to the value of a shopping cart based on the use of regular expressions. Now that we have that value available to us, we can aggregate it to form our lost revenue chart. The design strategy to accomplish this is to create a metric in Foglight Experience Viewer (FxV) that will sum up all the cart values of sessions that abandoned. This can be done in a transaction filter definition. In FxV, we go to Configure->Hit Analysis, and open up the transaction filter section. You can use a relevent existing transaction filter or create a new one using Quick Create and specifying the key events of your transaction by URL.
The summary for my Checkout transaction looks like this:
I only want to update this "Lost Sale" metric if and when the user abandons, so I open up the Abandoned event and create the "Lost Sale" metric there. For the Increment By field I choose the value of the session custom field that was populated with the cart value via regular expressions discussed in the previous blog. The resulting metric section looks like this:
The key here is this metric is only updated for abandoned transactions, e.g. ones that do not ever hit the completion event. I could just as easily add a "Booked Revenue" metric on the Orders Placed event and update it with the same custom session field to use in Foglight as well.
Within a few minutes you should see these new metrics appear in Foglight under the FxVModel under the Data tab of the right drawer panel:
You can now drag this metric out onto your personal dashboard and customize its display properties. When you drop it, pick the "Select Metrics.." option and you should get the following metric wizard (if you are on an older version of Foglight, you might get the default graph and have to go edit its properties):
You can pick the chart type you prefer, but I like the bar or area graph versions for this type of data. You should also select the Options tab and select the Sum option for the metric value.
And you are done!! You have a chart showing revenue abandonment over time!
Hopefully you're data is a little more exciting than my predictable test data. After you have this tracking data for awhile, you can look at historical trends, and even add alarms to let you know when the values venture above some threshold, so you can be investigating what is going on before your end users can even call into complain!!