Add To Carts
How many times shoppers put something in the basket.
What it means
Add To Carts is the number of times shoppers added an item to their cart in the period. It counts events, not people — one shopper who adds three items, removes one and adds it back logs four. Items later removed or left to go stale stay in the count.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Nothing is divided here. Google Analytics adds one to the count every time an add-to-cart event fires, so the figure is a raw tally of adds in the date range — including repeat adds by the same shopper and adds that were later emptied out.
Worked example. A week brings 12,000 item views, 900 Add To Carts, 520 checkout starts and 340 orders at an average of €70. The 560 adds that never became orders were worth roughly €39,000 at that average.
That figure isn't recoverable in full — plenty of those adds were price-checking. But it sizes the step, and it shows what even a small improvement between basket and order is worth.
It answers the question
How many shoppers got as far as wanting something? It separates a product page that fails to interest from a checkout that fails to close.
Why it matters
This is the middle of a four-step count — views, adds, checkout starts, orders — and the step-to-step drops are where the money leaks. Read as one conversion figure, a funnel tells you something is wrong; read as four counts, it tells you where.
It's also a volume figure, so it climbs whenever traffic climbs. The number that stays honest through a traffic change is Cart To View RateCart To View RateSee the full entry., and the two belong on screen together.
What good looks like
No target exists for a count like this — the right number depends on how many people visit and what you sell. Judge it against your own last 30 days, and only alongside the view count, since adds rising 20% on traffic that rose 30% is a decline dressed as growth. Sort your products by views and by adds: the ones high on the first and low on the second are the pages worth rewriting.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Land ads on the product page, not the homepage | Point paid and social traffic straight at the item in the creative | More adds on the same spend | 1 week | Shoppers see less of the range, so orders concentrate on a handful of advertised products and the rest of the catalogue stops being discovered. |
| Fast Add a sticky buy bar on mobile | Keep price, variant picker and the add button on screen as the shopper scrolls | Adds up, most visibly on long product pages | 1–2 weeks | It covers page content and pulls people to the basket before the sizing and delivery detail has done its work, so returns can rise with the adds. |
| Slow Rewrite the pages with views and no adds | New photography, clearer sizing, the questions your support inbox keeps answering | Adds rise on the products that already get attention | 4–6 weeks | Photography and copy cost real money and a quarter of attention that isn't going into acquisition — and some shoppers will now rule themselves out before adding. |
| Slow Fix internal search and collection filters | Make search return results for the words customers type, and let collection pages be narrowed | More sessions reach a product they'd actually add | 1 quarter | Filtered and search URLs multiply. Left unchecked, thin duplicates end up indexed and compete with the pages that already rank. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Adds and checkout starts are consecutive steps. The distance between them is the part of the funnel nobody looks at until it's costing real money.
The step is holding
More baskets and more of them reaching the till. The step between them survived the extra volume, which is the part that usually breaks first.
Baskets that go nowhere
People fill baskets and stop. Delivery cost appearing late, a broken cart drawer, or a forced sign-in — this is the most expensive corner on the page and usually the quickest to fix.
Fewer but more decided
Fewer adds, more of them serious. Either your traffic got sharper, or the add-to-cart tag stopped firing somewhere — verify the tag before enjoying it.
Thinner all the way up
Both counts fell together, which usually means less traffic or worse traffic rather than a page fault. Fix the top of the funnel before touching the pages.
A count next to its own rate says whether a change came from traffic or from persuasion. Adds up with the rate flat means you bought more views; adds up with the rate up means the pages started working. Only the second one keeps paying after the campaign ends.
The two ends of the buying decision, with everything that can go wrong sitting between them. Track the ratio month to month rather than either figure alone: when adds grow and orders don't follow, the failure is in checkout, and no amount of work on product pages will recover it.
Common misreads
It's events, not people. Re-adds, quantity changes and a shopper returning twice in a week all count again, so the figure runs well above the number of humans involved — especially on cheap, repeat-purchase lines.
Only if the steps below hold. A promotion that fills baskets and a delivery charge that empties them at the till produce a rising add count and a flat order count all month. Read the next two steps before you count the money.
Check the tag first. Quick-add buttons, bundle widgets, sticky bars and custom templates frequently miss the event, and the product reads dead while it sells normally. Sparse figures here mean a tagging gap far more often than no demand.
Also called
Adds to cart · add-to-cart events · basket adds
See yoursYour Add To Carts for the selected range, sitting in the funnel next to checkout starts and orders.
Open Google Analytics Overview →