For theme tests, visitors and sessions are tracked similar to Google Analytics and Shopify analytics - by setting a cookie in the user's browser and sending events to a database.
Theme Scientist installs a tiny pixel on your website that logs these events:
Visitors
Each unique person that comes to your site in a day is a visitor.
Sessions
A session is a period of time that a visitor hangs out on your site. A session expires after 30 minutes of activity or your local store time at midnight.
Page Views
Every time someone navigates to a page on your website, this counts as a page view.
Add to Cart
When someone clicks on add to cart button (or similar text such as "add to bag," "buy it now").
Orders
Each time a new order comes in, this increases by 1
Sales
The total amount of the order. Note: Refunds are not subtracted.
Conversion %
Orders divided by Sessions. This metric determines the winner of the test.
AOV (Average Order Value)
Sales divided by Orders. You can experiment with add-ons and upsells to increase this.
Sales / Session
Sales divided by Sessions. This indicates the value of each person that comes to your site.
Example Journey
Say a person comes to your store at 9 am. They view 2 pages, add 1 product to the cart, then leave.
That same person returns at 4 pm, looks at 3 more pages, adds 2 products to the cart, and purchases.
The logged stats would be:
- 1 visitor
- 2 sessions
- 5 page views
- 3 add to cart*
- 1 order
- $xx. xx sales
*This same journey would yield 2 adds to cart in Shopify analytics because Shopify tracks add to cart only once per session, not by actual adds to cart.