Decoding Your Shopify Conversion Rate: Are Short Sessions Skewing Your Data?

Understanding Conversion Rate: Beyond the Numbers

Hey everyone! I was just diving into a really interesting discussion in the Shopify Community about conversion rates, and I wanted to share some of the insights. The question came from fraizom, who was wondering whether to filter sessions by duration when analyzing conversion rates. It's a great question because those initial numbers can be deceiving!

Fraizom pointed out that their store's conversion rate jumped from 0.9% to around 2% after filtering out sessions shorter than 1 second. That's a huge difference! It really highlights how much those super-short sessions can skew your data.

The Case of the Sub-Second Sessions

So, what's going on with these ultra-short sessions? Well, they could be a number of things:

• Bots: Unfortunately, bots are a fact of life online. They can hit your site without any intention of buying anything.
• Accidental Clicks: We've all been there – accidentally clicking a link and immediately hitting the back button.
• Junk Traffic: This could be anything from misconfigured ads to just random internet noise.

The key takeaway is that these sessions don't represent genuine customer behavior. Including them in your overall conversion rate calculation can give you a misleading picture of your store's performance.

Filtering for Clarity

So, should you filter these sessions out? The general consensus seems to be: absolutely! Filtering gives you a much clearer view of how real customers are interacting with your store. As fraizom discovered, removing those sub-second sessions can significantly improve your conversion rate, giving you a more realistic benchmark.

Here's how you can approach filtering in your Shopify analytics:

1. Identify Your Filters: In Shopify's exploration reports, you can add filters like "Human session only" and "Session duration greater than X seconds."
2. Experiment with Duration: Fraizom used 1 second, but you might want to experiment with different durations (2 seconds, 3 seconds) to see what makes sense for your store. Consider the time it takes for a page to load and for a user to visually register the content.
3. Analyze the Impact: After applying the filters, carefully analyze how your conversion rate and other key metrics change. This will give you a better understanding of the impact of those short sessions.
4. Focus on Human Sessions: Make sure you are filtering for human sessions. This helps remove bot traffic.

Here's the original screenshot fraizom shared, which really illustrates the impact of filtering:

Funnel Problems: Raw vs. Filtered Data

When it comes to understanding funnel problems, it's generally better to rely on filtered, human-quality sessions. Raw session data can be useful for identifying overall traffic patterns, but it's not as helpful for diagnosing specific issues in your checkout process or product pages. You want to see how real, engaged customers are behaving.

By focusing on filtered data, you can get a much clearer picture of where customers are dropping off and what might be causing those drop-offs. This allows you to make more targeted improvements to your store and ultimately boost your conversion rate.

So, to wrap it up, filtering sessions by duration is a valuable technique for getting a more accurate and actionable view of your Shopify conversion rate. It helps you cut through the noise of bots and accidental clicks to focus on the behavior of real customers. Give it a try and see how it impacts your understanding of your store's performance!