The Primary Metric determines how each experience is measured and what defines success. It affects your experience differently depending on your traffic allocation method:
- A/B Test: A winner is declared when its primary metric reaches significant results.
- Dynamic Allocation: The variation with the highest performance in its primary metric will be served more users.
Dynamic Yield supports four types of primary metrics:
- Click-Through Rate – Clicks on a variation of your experience that results in redirecting the user to a different page. If you want to measure user engagements with a page element that do not result in a redirect such as using a filter, you should create a goal as your primary metric.
- Unit CTR – Clicks on a unit that is not a variation of your experience.
- Conversions of a Goal – Any action on the website, such as adding items to cart, purchases, newsletter subscriptions, etc.
- Revenue of a Goal – Revenue generated on the site from any activity, primarily purchases.
Note: In Dynamic Yield reports, you can see any secondary metric, without defining it as a primary metric, and without defining it as a secondary metric in advance.
Choosing the Right Metric
Revenue, even for ecommerce sites, is not necessarily the ideal metric for every campaign. We recommend choosing a primary metric that is connected to your experience hypothesis and the location of the experience in the funnel. For example:
- CTR for a hero banner in the homepage
- Add to Cart for a social proof notification in a product page
- Subscriptions for an email capture overlay
Choosing a metric that reflects the action you want from the user at this stage of the funnel will lead to faster conclusions because:
- We will have fewer variables in the data. If a test is on the homepage, and you use purchases as your primary metric, which occurs later in the funnel, there are more variables involved because the user's journey to make purchase involves a few more steps after the homepage. This will result in the algorithm taking longer to determine which variation is better.
- We will have more data points. If you are testing a new product page layout, the experience should measure how often users react to by adding something to the cart. If you set the primary metric to revenue, you would be missing out on data about users who added something to the cart but did not make a purchase. Having fewer data points would result in the algorithm taking longer to make a conclusion about which variation is better.
Summary
Improving your conversion funnel should be done one step at a time. While keeping in mind the overall goal of your funnel, you should design and measure experiences depending on where they are in your funnel, and what the goal of that particular step is.