About Conversion Rate

A conversion represents an end user's success in locating Web site content. In other words, a new search converts to a successful search when end users find what they are looking for.

You report these conversions with the Conversion Rate section. The Conversion Rate section shows conversion rates by date, type, terms, dimensions, and so on.

You define exactly what constitutes a conversion in the implementation of your Endeca application. Here are several examples of common conversion events:

An end user selects a specific record page. This is the simplest definition of a search converting to a successful search.
An end user performs a key action. For example, this action could be selecting an option such as "Add item to cart" or it could be downloading a long-form document.
An end user performs a secondary action, such as purchasing the contents of the cart. This is a common definition of conversion: a search becomes a successful search when it results in a purchase by the end user.

Your implementation then indicates to the Endeca logging API when a conversion event has occurred in a particular session.

The conversion rate is the number of converted sessions (i.e., user sessions that are converted into sales) divided by the number of total user sessions.

Each user session is indicated in the log entries by a SESSION_ID key/value pair. The SESSION_ID key is used to recall the previous search terms and navigation requests made during the user’s session. The results are automatically gathered and interpreted into the report.

The Conversion Rate section allows you to answer sales-related questions like, “What percentage of searches resulted in sales?”, “What was the conversion rate of the most popular search terms?”, and “Which dynamic business rules resulted in the most sales?”

All Conversion Rate items use a session queue. To make its conversion rates, the Report Generator keeps a given number of sessions in memory. You can adjust the size of the queue in the session_queue element of the report_settings.xml file. The default size of the session queue is set to 5000.

It is recommended that you set the session queue size to a number that is slightly higher than the maximum number of concurrent users that you expect on your site at a given time. Setting the size too high uses more memory. Setting the size too low can result in imprecise rate calculations.