How to use the add-to-cart rate calculator
Add-to-cart rate shows whether your product pages create intent. The formula is one line, carts divided by visits, but the value changes depending on whether the denominator is sessions or unique visitors. One shopper who visits three times in a day is three sessions and one visitor, so a visitor-based denominator produces a higher rate. Match whichever basis your analytics report uses.
Add completed orders and you also get the share of carts that turned into orders and the share abandoned. A healthy add-to-cart rate with a weak cart-to-order rate usually points at shipping cost, payment options or forced account creation rather than the product page.
Add average order value and you get the money sitting in abandoned carts, but read it as an upper bound that assumes every cart would have converted. Many shoppers use the cart as a comparison shelf, so treat the figure as a baseline for before-and-after tests rather than recoverable revenue. No average add-to-cart rate is provided here, because price point and category move it too much. Compare against your own store last month instead.
Frequently asked questions
Sessions suit page-level testing; unique visitors answer how many people out of a crowd added something. Pick one and keep reading the metric on that basis.
That happens when buy-now orders skip the cart entirely. The calculator flags it with a message, and you should feed in only orders that passed through the cart.