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Q. Which are the best measures or reports you could point to which help 

marketers understand how well an E‑commerce site is performing for retention?

Avinash Kaushik, Google:

 I touched on some of the obvious ones above, the Loyalty 

metrics (specifically Recency and Frequency). They immediately tell you if you are 

acquiring traffic that comes back again and again, and since GA will tell you Recency 

by going as far back in history as you have data, that is a great way to know when cus-

tomers come back (and perhaps also understand why).The other obvious thing to do 

for shorter time periods is to look at the trends for percentage of New Visits, especially 

by the sources of your traffic.

Some retailers want to do retention analysis by looking at repeat purchases. For 

this, Google Analytics, like pretty much every tool out there, provides a very strong 

complement of e-commerce reports that allow you to segment the data by the types 

of purchasers (new or returning), which will help you understand their purchase behav-

iour, and by applying filters to your data you can dig deeper into sources of traffic, 

trends in number of visits, content consumed etc.

This in conjunction with using even simple on-exit website surveys can give you a 

great picture of what is happening on your website and where you are missing the boat.

Q. Conversion optimisation. Today there is a lot more talk in large organisations