MVC - Most Valuable Customer
There was a great question about my Google Analytics e-commerce post this morning so I wanted to repost the solution I offered here. Greg wanted to know how to work out which referers and keywords drive the most revenue for his site when customers return over a period of a few months.
First I'll show you how to find high revenue customers generally then address your issue where people spend money over several months.
In the new reporting interface if you go to the "traffic sources" menu item on the left of your reporting interface and select "all traffic sources" you are nearly there. If you have correctly configured e-commerce tracking you should see three tabs above the table of results on the page "Site usage", "Goal Conversion" and "Ecommerce". Select "Ecommerce" and the table shows different columns. Left-click your mouse on the column "revenue" and your report is now a sorted list of the referring sites generating the highest revenue for you.
The other sort order you can use would be to click the "average value" comment to see which site refers the customers with the highest average order value which sounds like it might be what you are looking for.
The last report you may want to look at is under "Traffic Sources" > "Keywords" then select the "Ecommerce" tab and sort the table by "revenue" or "average value".
Google's cookie typically will keep track of a returning customer to your site so the original referer is maintained. This means the reports I describe above will still help you identify the best keywords and sites for visitors who keep coming back - just look for the highest average revenue referer and keyword.
If you need to track the average number of transactions per referer you can either set a cookie on the visitors browser incremented each time they place an order and pass that as a custom parameter on the checkout page or a more robust solution would be to query your customer order database on the checkout page to count how many orders they have placed and pass it in the same way. This is more robust because it doesn't rely on the client not deleting cookies periodically. This solution would also allow you to track a different stat too - you could pass the lifetime revenue as a custom parameter on the checkout page. A filter would allow you to translate the values into revenue bands and then under "Visitors" > "User Defined" you could review each revenue band. You have the option of looking at each user defined value cross-referenced by segment (the dropdown) so you can see which referers and keywords are responsible for the highest lifetime value customers.
