D381 Task 1 E-commerce Analytics Evaluation Example

Steady Traffic, Shrinking Orders: An E-Commerce Analytics Evaluation of Where Mobile Shoppers Leave a Composite Outdoor Gear Retailer's Store and Which Channels Bring Buyers

Student Name

School of Business, Western Governors University

D381: Digital Marketing and E-Commerce, Task 1

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Steady Traffic, Shrinking Orders: An E-Commerce Analytics Evaluation of Where Mobile Shoppers Leave a Composite Outdoor Gear Retailer's Store and Which Channels Bring Buyers

The Retailer and the Problem

Timberline Outfitters, a composite outdoor gear retailer based in Boise, Idaho, sells tents, packs, footwear and clothing through three stores and an online store that produces 55% of revenue. Online traffic has held steady at about 180,000 sessions a month for a year, but the conversion rate has fallen from 2.4% to 1.8%. With an average order value of $118, that drop means monthly online revenue has fallen from about $509,800 to about $382,300, a loss of roughly $127,500 a month. Leadership asked for an evaluation of recent campaigns and the store itself to find out why.

Data and Approach

The evaluation uses twelve months of web analytics data covering sessions, sources, devices and funnel steps; platform reports from the paid search, paid social and email campaigns; and 400 responses to an exit survey shown to shoppers who left checkout. Digital marketing research frames performance as the result of how firms use digital channels across the whole path from awareness to purchase and retention, so a problem can sit in acquisition, on the site or after the sale (Kannan & Li, 2017). The evaluation therefore looks at both where visitors come from and what happens once they arrive.

Campaign Performance Against Goals

The spring campaign had goals of 20% more online revenue than the prior spring and a return on ad spend of at least 4 to 1. It reached neither. Paid search returned $6.20 for every dollar spent and brought visitors who converted at 3.1%. Email to existing customers converted at 4.4% at almost no cost. Paid social, which received 45% of the $90,000 budget, returned $1.40 per dollar, and its visitors converted at 0.6%. Paid social did bring many first-time visitors, but most viewed one page and left. The campaign's overall shortfall comes largely from shifting budget toward a channel that attracts browsers rather than buyers.

The Conversion Funnel

Mobile devices now account for 64% of sessions, up from 51% a year ago, while desktop sessions declined. Desktop conversion is stable at 3.3%; mobile conversion has fallen to 1.0%. The drop in overall conversion is therefore largely a mobile problem made worse by the shift in device mix.

The mobile funnel shows where shoppers leave. Of mobile sessions that add an item to the cart, 58% begin checkout, and 71% of those reach the shipping step. At the shipping step, 49% abandon, far higher than any other step and far higher than desktop's 22% at the same step. Shipping costs are displayed for the first time on that step, and the site charges $9.95 for orders under $99.

The exit survey supports the pattern: the most common reason given for leaving was unexpected shipping cost, followed by the need to create an account and a payment form that was hard to use on a phone. This matches large-scale checkout research, in which extra costs such as shipping are the reason shoppers most often give for abandoning an order (Baymard Institute, n.d.).

Acquisition Channels

Channels differ sharply in the quality of visitors they bring. Paid search and email visitors arrive with intent, often searching for a specific product. Organic search brings steady traffic that converts at 2.5%. Paid social brings the most new visitors but, at 0.6% conversion, costs about $84 per order against an average order value of $118, leaving little margin after product costs. Referral traffic from two hiking blogs is small but converts at 3.8%, suggesting an opportunity.

Recommendations

Show shipping costs on the product page and in the cart, and test a lower free shipping threshold of $75, since most abandoned carts sit between $60 and $99.

Offer guest checkout and digital wallet payments on mobile, removing the account step and the long card form.

Move 20 percentage points of the paid social budget to paid search and to affiliate partnerships with outdoor blogs, and use the remaining paid social budget for retargeting visitors who viewed products rather than for broad reach.

Grow the email list with a gear checklist for trips such as a first backpacking weekend, since email is the best converting channel and costs least.

Add a retention step: a post-purchase email series with care tips and a review request, which strengthens repeat purchase.

Testing Plan

Each change will be tested rather than assumed. Controlled online experiments, in which visitors are randomly assigned to the current and changed versions of a page, are the most reliable way to learn whether a change causes an improvement, and practitioners stress running them long enough, checking that assignment works as intended and choosing one main metric in advance (Kohavi et al., 2020). Timberline will test the shipping display and threshold first, measuring mobile conversion and profit per session, since a lower threshold could raise orders while lowering margin. Guest checkout will follow, then the channel budget shift, evaluated over a full month against the prior month and the same month last year.

Expected Impact and Limits

If mobile conversion recovered only to 1.6%, still well below desktop, overall conversion would return to about 2.2% and monthly online revenue would rise by roughly $87,000. The estimates have limits. Analytics tools attribute each sale to a channel using rules that can understate channels that introduce shoppers who buy later, so paid social's contribution may be larger than its last-click figures show; the retargeting test will help reveal it. Privacy settings also reduce tracking, and survey respondents may not represent all shoppers who left. Findings should be updated as test results arrive.

Conclusion

Timberline's traffic has not fallen; its ability to turn mobile visitors into buyers has. Shipping costs revealed late in a hard-to-use mobile checkout, and a campaign budget weighted toward a channel that brings browsers, explain most of the lost revenue. Fixing the mobile checkout, rebalancing channels and testing each change should restore conversion and give the retailer a clearer view of what works.

References

Baymard Institute. (n.d.). Cart abandonment rate statistics. Retrieved September 29, 2026, from https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate

Kannan, P. K., & Li, H. (2017). Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), 22-45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2016.11.006

Kohavi, R., Tang, D., & Xu, Y. (2020). Trustworthy online controlled experiments: A practical guide to A/B testing. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108653985