Average Cost per Visit
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Often it pays dividends to keep track of the cost of driving individual visits to the web site for comparison to your average cost per visitor. These key performance indicators used in tandem can tell you a great deal about your marketing acquisition costs.
Definition
A function of the total sum of marketing costs, the average cost per visit is defined as:
Sum of Acquisition Marketing Costs / Visits = Average Cost per Visit
Challenges associate with calculating this key performance indicator are the same as average cost per visitor.
Presentation
It is a good idea to present average cost per visit and average cost per visitor side-by-side, depending on how different these calculations are.
Expectation
In an idea world you would be able to drive visits with little or no marketing costs; unfortunately it is far from an ideal world. Still, lower is better.
Action
Especially when experimenting with new marketing channels you want to watch your average cost per visit carefully, looking for a dramatic increase that is not correlated with increases in value-based KPIs like average value per conversion, revenue per visit or average order value.
