Category Performance

Overview

When you first arrive at a category, you'll see the category performance view.  This will help you to identify the health of this specific category over time, in a way that's very similar to the dashboard and product performance. This will help you to make critical decisions to grow your business, in almost an instant.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration

Getting Started

There are no prerequisites to get started with this article.

Category Performance

Here is what it looks like when you arrive at the category performance view.  You'll first see the name of the category and the last day it was modified.  This is followed with the ability to add another category and the performance chart.  The data seen here is compiled using all of the products that are part of the selected category.

This performance chart is filtered by a date range, beginning with Year.  This will show the chart and sales funnel using data over the past 12 months.  However, you can change the date range to be any other range, without affecting others in the site.

The performance chart has a number of features to be aware of.  The labels and data are described below.

Feature	Description
Bounced	This metric represents the number of products in this category that were viewed by customers, but were never added to the shopping cart.  Ideally, this never should continue to go down over time.
Abandoned	The abandonment rate is the number of products in this category that were added to the shopping cart, but never actually purchased.  Ideally, this number should continue to go down over time.  This number is generally lower than the bounce rate.
Purchased	If this metric sounds self-explanatory, then you're correct.  This is the number of products in this category that have been purchased.  This number is usually lower than the Abandoned rate and should go up over time.
Image Update	This marker lets you know when the category image was last updated, which may be a contributing factor to the category performance increasing or decreasing.
Copy Update	The copy marker tells you when the category name, description, or any of it's meta data was last updated.  It's common to see this kind of update have an impact on the performance of a category.
Products Update	Anytime you add or remove a product from the category, this marker will be placed.
Multiple Updates	If you have two or more markers on the same day, this marker will be used to let you know.  It would generally be best to make small changes and measure them over time, instead of applying a large number of updates all at once.

Sales Funnel

The sales funnel is just to the right of the main performance chart.  The sales funnel is exactly what it might sound like.  It represents the actual and current sales health for the category.  For each stage of the sales funnel, you'll not only see the matching metric, but also the overall trend for the selected date range.  This will help you to use this information, instead of it simply being a vanity metric.

Feature	Description
Views	This represents the number of times the product has been viewed.  This number is usually substantially higher than the next two stages of the funnel.
Added to Cart	This value will be increased everytime someone adds a product in this category to their cart, after having viewed it.
Purchased	This is precisely what it sounds like - someone added a product from this category to their cart, and then completed the purchase process.