If you are selling any kind of products online and therefore have any kind of eCommerce functionality on your website, you will no doubt have people adding items to your shopping cart and leaving your site before they actually buy, a.k.a shopping cart abandonment. Before we get into too much detail on this, I’ll explain this concept further for anyone it is unfamiliar to it.

What Is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

As mentioned above, this is defined as the people who add items to their shopping cart, but then don’t end up buying the items in their shopping cart. So, obviously, if you have an eCommerce store, you want this number (shopping cart abandonment rate) to be as close to 0% as possible.

But let’s be honest, we’ve all been guilty of doing this before. So, this rate is very very unlikely going to be 0%. But of course, it raises the question of what is a good rate? And, that is probably a topic for another discussion.

Case Study

Anyway, we took on a client who has a very high shopping cart abandonment rate – 65.5%! That means that, a whopping 65.5% of the people who added items into their shopping cart, did not purchase. How do we know with such accuracy? We measured it in Google Analytics. See below.

 

Now improving this shopping cart abandonment rate is an obvious problem to fix (with conversion rate optimisation) and we will get to that in another case study.

So, when this client came to us, having a dedicated campaign just targeting these specific people was an obvious strategy.

How Does A Shopping Cart Abandonment Campaign Look Graphically?

 

As you can see in the image above, this is the sequence of events.

A bunch of people land on any page on your website, 3 people add items to their shopping cart, but only 1 person actually makes a purchase. So, a shopping cart abandonment campaign is one which ONLY shows ads to those 2 people that added items into their shopping cart who didn’t purchase.

The Results From The Shopping Cart Abandon Campaigns…

One of the best aspects of creating a dedicated campaigns for this, is that you can tailor your ads specifically for them.

What do I mean? I mean that you can show these specific people an offer which ‘sweetens the deal’ somewhat. A typical offer is “Free Shipping” or “10% off your next order”.

And that is exactly what we did with this campaign. We showed these specific people an ad which had a discount shown in the banner / text ad and the results were amazing.

Now, I’ll refrain from going into the technicalities on exactly how you create such a campaign, as the point is, these types of campaigns have an amazing ROI (return on investment). And, the proof is below (you can click on the image to see the data enlarged).

There are a couple of things I want to point out in the image above.

1. Account level CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

The overall CPA for the entire account is $16.31 (in the top right hand corner).

So, the ad groups are ranked by the lowest CPA – i.e. it is ranked by the best performing ad groups as they have the lowest cost to acquire a purchaser.

And therefore, 5 out of the best 7 ad groups are a shopping cart abandonment campaigns.

2. CPA of the Shopping Cart Abandonment campaigns

Another extremely important metric to point out is the difference in the CPA to the overall average of the account. Yes, you can see correctly, overall this client pays $16.31 to acquire someone who will buy something, but these campaigns cost them a fraction of the cost. In some campaigns, less than $1!

So, by not having these dedicated campaigns, you are undoubtedly leaving A LOT of money on the table.

If you feel like your business could benefit from one of these types of campaigns, get in touch with us and we can see if we can help.