by Michaela Langstone

Created on: March 24, 2010

HOW IS THE GOOGLE $ INDEX CALCULATED?

$ Index is calculated as follows:

$ Index         =        (Ecommerce Revenue + Total Goal Value) / Number of Unique Page Views for Given Page

In this formula, the “Ecommerce Revenue” is the amount spent in the ecommerce transaction, the “Total Goal Value” is the value assigned to the goal page by the user, and the “Number of Unique Page Views for Given Page” is the number of page views per session of each non-goal, non-transaction page.

As an example, let’s say that you have assigned your goal page a $5 value and label the page “D”.  The other pages leading to “D” would be labelled “A”, “B” and “C” and can be viewed any number of times in a session, yielding a unique page view figure.  A customer comes to your Web site, views page “A” 3 times, page “B” 5 times and page “C” 6 times then completes a transaction for $200 (Ecommerce revenue) leading to the receipt page “E”.

Assuming there are several sessions and using the formula to calculate “$ Index”, the pages would have the following $ Indices:

$ Index for Page A = $71.67

$ Index for Page B = $45

$ Index for Page C = $38.33

$ Index for Page E = $205

Uses of $ Index

The figures calculated above illustrate that if there is only one transaction in a session, the more page views a page receives per session, the lower its $ Index value.  This would have implications on a small business since this data can be used to determine which pages are more effective in leading to a customer conversion or an ecommerce transaction.  You can then experiment which pages to leave and which to take out in order to save money as well as to create a more efficient Web site.

Bibliography

Google.  “How do I calculate $ Index?” Google Analytics, 2009.

             <http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/an swer.py?hl=en&answer=86205> (22 January 2010)

Cutroni, Justin. “What is $ Index?” Analytics Talk, June 9, 2006.

             <http://www.epikone.com/blog/2006/06/09/what-is-index /> (22 January 2010)

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