Web Analytics Primer: Five Metrics Demystified

4. Two Words: Site Overlay

Once you've balanced your paid and organic search efforts and fixed your landing pages and keywords, there's Site Overlay. This tool provides a great visual — instead of charts, spreadsheets or graphs, you see an actual picture of your Web pages with valuable information showing exactly how many people clicked on each link.

What is It Telling You?
"This tool opens up a page of your Web site and you can see what customers like and what they don't by what links are getting clicked, you get click density, and it's a wonderful tool for people who don't know how to, or what to, improve," said Kaushik.

Each tool will show it slightly differently. Google Analytics shows "colored bars," and if you hover the mouse over the link it also shows goal conversion metrics. ClickTracks shows the clicks as a percent (very helpful). Others show a "heat map" and others still draw boxes around elements on the page.

What to Do Next?
Kaushik said this tool can help you prepare for a successful fourth-quarter selling season. "Look at these reports for the couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. I highly recommend e-tailers see what links and products are hot for the start up of the holiday rush, and then go back and optimize everything for the core selling season of Black Friday to December 25."

Kaushik advises said to look for clusters of heavy clicks. Try reconciling the top two or three most clicked-on links with the ones you want visitors to click on. Look at what is connecting with people, for instance, are more people buying after clicking on product comparisons on the home page or on a product page.

"I was working with a retailer, and we did Site Overlay and the most popular link was the 'best value product,' and the thing is below the fold, at the bottom half of the page, and even though it was hidden people are still finding it," said Kaushik, "so by simply moving it to the top right, sales went up dramatically."

5. Focus on Outcomes

Finally, Kaushik said you have to focus on reporting that will show you how well your business is doing. He suggests doing two things: first create a funnel report that shows where people are dropping off in the buying cycle. This can be done, he said, in 10 minutes and will uncover the "choke point" in the chain from entering a site to checking out. "Usually it's just one page, so you figure out what the snag is and fix it. Anyone can fix one page."

What is It Telling You?
The second recommendation is to issue reports that show you how much revenue you're generating, which products are top sellers, what your average order value is, as well as things including how many transactions you typically have in a day and what times of day or days are heavy volume days.

What to Do Next?
Clearly, it's important to also track conversions. "You can track these so that, for example, if you have 80 products, you can tell which ones are hot, and if you're getting ready for December, you can be sure to have lots on hand," Kaushik said. "For instance, you can segment by geographic location to get a better understanding of preferences across states, so you may find that California is buying your toy robot, and Show Me Elmo is a hot seller in Florida, but not vice versa, so you target just Florida for Elmo and just California for robots in your e-mail campaigns and marketing efforts."

Final Words of Encouragement

All of this will only take about an hour a day to keep up with, said Kaushik, and you will have enough information to dramatically change the way you run your online store. "You can improve your return on investment while saving money. Focus on customers," he said, "analytics really is one of the few things where you're not just throwing money down a hole."

We did mention that he was an evangelist, and Kaushik likes to use exaggeration as a form of humor, but we're not entirely sure he was joking when he gave these parting words: "Lots of people tell me they do things with their Web site because they have an instinctual, gut feeling about it," he said, "And I tell them that's not smart at all. There is so much data available free, updated in real time that you can use to make decisions, not to do so is just a crime against humanity."

Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!

Tools:

Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites

Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box

IE 7 |

Firefox 2.0 |

Firefox 1.5.x

Receive news via our XML/RSS feed