Many years ago, I wrote a post about shopping cart persistence based upon a query from a client. That post showed how to see how long items had been in the cart and a few other things. In this post, I am going to take a different slant and talk about how you can see which items are persisting in the cart and whether visitors are purchasing products they have persisted in the shopping cart.

What’s Persisting In The Cart?

The first step is to identify what items are persisting in the shopping cart when visitors arrive at your site. To do this, you can set a success event on the 1st page of the session (let’s call it Persistent Cart Visits) and then set the Products variable with each product that is in the cart.

s.events=”event95″;
s.products=”;blue polo shirt,;soccer ball”;

This will allow you to easily report upon which products are most often in the cart when visits begin:

This data can also be trended over time to see if there are certain products that are frequently persisting in the cart and you can merge this data with product cost information to see potential missed opportunities for revenue. This data can also be useful for re-marketing efforts, like offering a coupon or discount on items left in the cart. You can also use Date Range segments to see which products added to the cart last week (for example) were viewed as a persistent cart this week.

Compare Cart Persistence to Orders

Once you have the preceding items tagged, you can look to see how often any of the products that were persisting in the cart were purchased. One way to do this is to use the Products report to compare Persistent Cart Visits and Orders. This will allow you to see a ratio of orders per persistent cart visits (by product):

This allows you to see which products are getting purchased and you can break this report down by campaign to see if any of your re-marketing efforts are leading to success.

General Persistent Cart Conversion

Another approach to cart persistence is understanding, in general, how often cart persistence leads to conversion. Using the calculated metric shown above by itself, you can easily see the cart persistence conversion rate over time:

Alternatively, you can use segmentation to isolate visits that had an order AND had items in the cart when the visit began. This can be done by creating a success event using the Orders and Persistent Cart Visits success events:

Once this segment is created, it can be added to a Visits metric or Revenue metric or any other number of items to create some interesting derived calculated metrics.

Of course, you can also create product-specific segments to see how often visitors are purchasing a specific product that they have persisted in the cart by adding the Products variable to the preceding segment like this:

Advanced Cart Persistence

If you like this concept and want to take it to the “Top Gun” level, here is another cool use case you can try out. When visitors come to your site and have an item persisting in their cart, have your developers note which products were in the cart (same list passed to the Products variable above). Next, wait until visitors complete an order on the site and look at the persistent cart product list and if any of the products purchased were in the persistent cart list, track that via a Merchandising eVar (as a flag). At the same time, you can add two new success events (Persistent Cart Orders and Persistent Cart Revenue) in the Products string as well:

 s.events=”purchase,event110.event111″;
s.products=”;blue polo shirt;1;50;event110=1|event111=50;evar90=persistent-cart,;blue purse;1;45″;

In this example, the customer is purchasing two items, but only one was a result of the persistent cart. By setting a flag in the Merchandising eVar and two new success events, we can isolate the specific product that was attributed to the persistent cart and see a count of Orders and Revenue resulting from cart persistence. Once this is done, you can trend Persistent Cart Orders and Revenue and even compare those metrics to total Orders and Revenue to see what % of Orders and Revenue is due to cart persistence.

Another super-cool thing you can do is use the new Analysis Workspace Cohort Analysis visualization to compare Cart Additions and Persistent Cart Orders to see what % of people adding items to the cart come back to order items in the cart.

Unfortunately, since you cannot yet use derived calculated metrics in Cohort Analysis, you may get some extraneous data you don’t want in the Cohort table (i.e. people purchasing multiple items and only some being due to cart persistence), but it should still give you some interesting data (and maybe one day Adobe will allow calculated metrics in Cohort Analysis!).

In summary, there are lots of cool ways you can measure shopping cart persistence. These are just a few of them. If you have any other ways you have done this, feel free to leave a comment here.  Thanks!