This document will explain, in detail, the current abilities of the Traffic Sources reporting section on Cratejoy, it’s inevitable roadmap, contrast the differences between this data and what you might find on Google Analytics, and then hopefully answer any other questions you might have in the final FAQ section.
What is Traffic Sources?
Traffic Sources is a new reporting area whose first sections have just recently been made available on Cratejoy. Its eventual goal is to allow you to deeply analyze your traffic and marketing campaigns such that you can evaluate their success, and even allow you to filter down to individual campaigns.
This allows you to gain the majority of the benefits that you would obtain from popular services like Google Analytics with a much friendlier and focused UI.
A sample of what Traffic Sources will look like when it’s complete
How do I get to Traffic Sources?
You can find Traffic Sources in the menu underneath the 'Analytics' item.
How does the conversion funnel tool work?
The conversion funnel will display the number of visitors to your site, or to your marketplace listing, who have made it to each point towards successfully purchasing one of your products. There are four steps that we track in this process:
- Visiting your website (Or Marketplace Listing)
- Entering your subscribe flow
- Visiting your checkout page
- Successfully checking out
How does the "Traffic Sources" tool work?
This control will break down the different distinct web sources which have sent traffic to your store. Social Media and Search both can be expanded to view their constituent parts.
What is available so far?
There are five proposed stages for this section:
- Your overall Views and Sales
- Your Conversion Funnel
- Breaking down visits by Medium (Ex: Social Media), and their constituent sources (Ex: Facebook, Instagram)
- Cross-medium filtering. Compare any part of any medium with any part of any other medium.
What's coming up next?
- Filtering by Mediums and allowing you to compare your sales, views, and conversion funnel data within a Medium.
Why might this data be different from Google Analytics?
It’s very likely you will notice immediate differences between Cratejoy’s Traffic Sources numbers and those that you would see in Google Analytics. There are a few core reasons behind this:
- Sessions/visits are recorded differently. Cratejoy will record all actions and sales attributed to the first 'hit' we see from a given visitor on your storefront. Here is how a session is capped and defined within Google Analytics:
- Whenever a user is idle for 30 minutes, a new session is created
- Whenever a user's campaign is changed, a new session is created (So if someone clicks four different links pointing to your store, that's four sessions)
- Whenever the clock strikes midnight
- Google Analytics samples data. This means that they analyze a subset of your overall traffic and assume that this sampling applies to your traffic as a whole.
- Cratejoy has access to specific conversion and sales data. This means that it’s far more reasonable for Cratejoy to be able to push out stats such as LTV by Source, Churn by Source, etc... in the future
FAQ:
Why do some of the numbers I see here differ from what I might see on Google Analytics?
See the "Why might this data be different from Google Analytics?” section above.
Do I need Google Analytics installed?
No, this feature will function the same independent of any Google Analytics installation.
Should I have Google Analytics installed anyways?
Absolutely! Google Analytics is great at filling any and all gaps that are not covered in this reporting section, and using both of these tools together will allow you to access the benefits of each in turn.
How often do these statistics update?
The statistics will update every four hours.
Will I eventually be able to see sales from a specific source like Facebook, Instagram, etc..?
Yes! This is contained in an upcoming release.
Will I eventually be able to see which search terms, etc.. within the Marketplace led to my store?
We do want to eventually provide a much deeper insight into this, but it is not on our current roadmap.
How will the conversion funnel work for purchasing non-subscription items? How would that look?
In the case of a visitor purchasing a 'single purchase' product, their visit would be recorded as hitting all four points in the funnel even though they technically never visited the subscribe flow.
This would be identical in appearance to somebody clicking 'Subscribe' on your site if you had only a single product with no other variants: They would immediately get routed to the checkout page, but we would record them as having hit the subscribe page as well.
How will the conversion funnel work if I host my website completely separate from Cratejoy, and only use Cratejoy for its checkout page?
Similar to the 'single purchase' question above. A successful checkout will record as a hit on all four steps of the funnel. However, because your 'normal' traffic is on a website completely separate from Cratejoy, you would likely have VERY few 'visits' to your site according to this funnel.
The funnel would still very accurately display conversion from hitting your checkout page to actually purchasing, but it's likely the first two steps would be far less useful in this case.
I think my data is wrong, who do I contact?
Submit a ticket here. Our team in charge of this feature will be closely monitoring any incoming issues regarding this feature and we’ll work to respond as promptly as we can.