Which Pages Should You Try and Optimise for Conversions?

This has been a question going through my mind for quite some time now – yes you know which pages are bringing in traffic, and we can maybe come up with an idea that perhaps one page is letting your whole site down – so you run Crazy Egg and make some changes and maybe it improves things.

Well, since reading Brian Clifton’s Google Analytics book I’ve discovered the $Index – a wonderful way of determining how well a page sells your product/service.

What is the $ Index?

Well the $ Index is essentially a measure of the amount of money earned on a site where the converting visit viewed that page. It is calculated with the following equation:

$ Index = (Ecommerce Value + Total Goal Value) / Number of Unique Page Views

You can find it in the top content report on Google Analytics, it looks like this:

Example

User 1 lands on the site at page A, he then clicks on page B and then page C and then page D (the goal page – goal value of £10) and finally makes a purchase (£100) and lands on the purchase confirm page, page E.

Page B would therefore have a $ Index of £110 (£100 + £10) divided by one unique page view, which is £110.
Page C would also have a $ Index of £110.

User 2 lands on the site at Page A, clicks on page C and then decides to leave.

Page B would still have a $ Index of £110.
Page C would now have a $ Index of £110 (£100 + £10) divided by two unique page views, which is £55.

User 3 lands on the site at page A then clicks on page B, then on page C, then page D (goal value £10) and finally makes a purchase (£50) and lands on page E.

Page B would now have a $ Index of £170 (£110 + £10 + £50 + £10) divided by 2 unique page views gives £85.
Page C would now have a $ Index of £170 divided by 3 unique page views giving £56.67.

So you could argue page B does a better job at converting customers than page C (although there are limitations in this example).

Why is this useful?

For all those people who are using Google AdWords and are rotating their ad creative, this should be obvious – you can look at the different pages on your site and see which ones are actually influencing sales (or goals). You can then see which pages are adding most to sales and also which pages are under performing and could do with improvement. Either way it’s a great way to identify pages that you can run multivariant testing or A/B split testing on.

Where do I find this fantabulous metric?

1. Login to Google Analytics and visit the Content Section > Top Content Report.
2. I normally do an advanced filter, in this case I’ve filtered out anything with less than 1000 unique page views in the last 30 days.
3. You may also want to filter out top performing or badly performng pages by filtering based on $ Index above or below the site average – depending on what you want to look at.
4. In most cases you will get your shopping cart or checkout page as high $ Index pages – this is to be expected as ALL ecomerce sales will be going through the funnel.