How Persona Success Report Works
Persona combines your website visits data as well as your store's orders data in order to estimate the value added by your Persona campaigns.
To do so, Persona calculates your conversion rate, and your customers' average order value, for visitors in your cohort "On", and visitors in your cohort "Off".
Conversion rate & average order value
The formula used to calculate your conversion rate is:
Total number of orders in the last 30 days / Total number of visits recorded by Persona in the last 30 days * 100
The formula used to calculate your customers' average order value is:
Total value of orders in the last 30 days / Total number of orders in the last 30 days * 100
Each of those metrics is tracked twice, once for your cohort "On" visitors, and once for your cohort "Off" visitors.
What is the difference between cohort "On" and "cohort "Off"?
Persona divides all your website visitors (who provided their consent to be tracked) in 2 cohorts:
- Visitors who experience your website, with Persona "On".
- Visitors who experience your website, with Persona "Off".
Visitors in the Persona "On" Cohort are visitors who are targeted by your Persona Campaigns. They see you notifications, your pop-ups, your website blocks, and their actions are tracked throughout your website.
Visitors in the Persona "Off" Cohort are visitors who are not targeted by your Persona Campaigns. They do not see you notifications, they do not see your pop-ups, and they do not see your website blocks. They experience your website, without anything added by Persona. However their actions are tracked throughout your website.
By default, 50% of your your visitors will be attributed to the cohort "On", and the other 50% will be attributed to the cohort "Off".
Why is Persona not delivering communications on purpose for 50% of my visitors?
Tracking the real impact of web personalization on your sales is impossible without A/B testing your entire Persona workflows.
While Persona offers an attribution model allowing you to recognize when an order has been made by a visitor who significantly interacted with one of your Persona communications, it does not provide you with a full picture of the real impact that web personalization has on your store:
Order attribution is not enough to define success
As you know, Persona tracks your visitors' interactions & orders with the aim of recognizing when Persona influenced an order.
For example, if you have a pop-up that includes a link applying a discount when clicked, and that a visitor clicks it, Persona will recognize this click as significant enough to attribute any order placed by this visitor during this session to your pop-up.
The above might seems sufficient, but there are multiple situations in which your Persona communications might influence your visitor's behaviour, without necessarily being able to record a click directly on the communication.
For example, you might have set up an amazing welcome pop-up, advising all of your visitors that you are offering free shipping, this weekend only.
If a visitor sees the offer in your pop-up and it makes them decide that today is the day they'll finally place the order that they were hesitating about, the action of closing the pop-up without clicking anything in it will not be recognized as a meaningful interaction, which means that the order that this visitor will make on your website will not be attributed to your pop-up.
In other words, visitors seeing/reading your embedded website blocks, your pop-ups, and your notifications might convert more easily and place orders of higher value, but you would not be able to know it, unless if Persona was to count every communication seen as meaningful interactions, leading to 100% of your sales to be considered as "influenced by Persona".
Most web personalization solutions forget about possible negative impacts
Web personalization is a superpower, and with great power comes great responsibility. If used in the wrong way, it is possible that web personalization has a negative impact on your results.
For example, if you were to set up 30 different campaigns targeting the same segment, and that you included a pop-up in each of them, you would run the risk of frustrating your visitor, possibly leading to the visitor exiting your website, even though this visitor could have placed an order had they not been targeted by all of those pop-ups.
If Persona was relying solely on order attribution to define success, it wouldn't be able to provide you with an estimate of the sales that have been missed as a result of badly setup Persona campaigns.