EBizInsider

Imagine you were kidnapped and dropped in the midst of a jungle. Worse, you’re in hostile territory, you hear guns and people approaching. How do you get out of this crazy predicament?

I bet you’re wishing that Rambo just showed up with all of his survival knowledge, tools, and equipment and helped you get out of this mess.

Where am I going with this? I strongly believe that in today’s fast moving data-driven age, every website owner must have an advanced analytics package. If you don’t, then you
really are lost and you’ll need a Rambo.

The good news is Google is offering an advanced analytics package–FREE! Your favorite price. Google Analytics is an advanced web package which allows you to get a 360° view of visitor behaviors and trends. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for a free account. A piece of code (provided by Google Analytics) is inserted on each page of your website and you’re good to go. It’s a little more involved for Yahoo! stores, which we will discuss below.

Google Analytics allows you to understand everything that is happening from the visitors’ arrival until the time they order, so that you can make educated changes and improvements to your store. It is a given that if you are serious about making money online, you need concrete data to make educated decisions. It has become imperative for us to analyze each change made to our store, as it has a direct effect on the intended consumer’s behavior. The good old days of relying solely on your traditional hosting package’s analytics or Yahoo! stores’ analytics are over.

Google Analytics gives the e-commerce operator the capability of analyzing key factors such as:

• Total Traffic - Repeat visitors vs. unique visitors.
• Origin of Traffic –Tracking the countries/states of your users.
• Source of the Traffic - Direct, Search Engines, Other referring sites, etc
• Medium of the Traffic - Organic/Natural Results, Paid Search Analysis (One click integration with Google Adwords), etc.
• Keyword Analysis – Keywords used to find your website can help you with evaluating your organic rankings on different search engines.
• Top Pages – Most popular pages within your website.
• Page Performance - Bounce Rates/Exit Rates – people leaving your page/website, time spent by each user, etc.
• Content Drilldown - How the user navigates throughout your website.
• Site Overlay – What part/links throughout your website are being clicked on the most.

To make this even sweeter, with a little bit of code modification Google Analytics can provide key marketing insights for e-commerce stores including:

• Conversion Rates – Broken down by Medium (defined above), time of day, etc.
• Customized Goals – Allows you to specify which metrics you want to measure (e.g. - I want a visitor to land here, and my goal is to lead them here. How often was I successful?)
• Shopping Cart Abandonment – How many people are clicking on the add to cart button but not completing the transaction (Analyzing the breakdown of the cycle allows you to correct the flaws and weak spots)
• E-commerce – It allows you to see how much money each source/medium produced, and from which origin. Also allows you to see which are the top-converting products, etc.
• Tracking other Marketing Initiatives – Such as Email, media/banner placements, Yahoo!/MSN PPC, etc.

The above information is a few clicks and a couple minutes away. It’s also just a glimpse of what can be derived from Google Analytics.

There is a minor obstacle for Yahoo! Store Owners. Unfortunately, due to the Yahoo! store leaving the domain to complete the transaction (after the user adds something to the cart), you need to customize the code in order to extract marketing data like conversion rates, revenue, popular items, etc. The good news is, Solid Cactus is now offering a 20% off for Ebiz Insider readers. This offer is good through March 31st, so go to http://www.solidcactus.com/google-analytics.html and enter the coupon code “Rambo”.

The information is out there, Google Analytics will help you get it and make sense of it, and Yahoo! store owners get a Solid Cactus discount this month only. So–why wait?

Name (required)

E-Mail (required)

(Will not be published)

Website

Comments

Security Code

Enter the code above into this box. There's no letters, only numbers. We just want to make sure you're human.