One of the most common complaints heard from small business e-commerce entrepreneurs is "Why is no one buying from me?" While design and product selection are easy fixes, there are more unknown factors that keep shoppers away from your store. Enter: Web analytics.
If you're armed with statistical data about your online store — Where your visitors are coming from? How long are they staying? Why are they leaving? What keywords are shoppers using on Google or Yahoo that lead them to your site? — you stand a much better chance of being successful in the long run.
Until recently, Web analytics packages have been pricey. Today, thanks to Google, it's free.
According to Google, the Google Analytics service "shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Improve your Web site return on investment, increase conversions and make more money on the Web." While the making more money part isn't as easy as it sounds, using Google Analytics can point you in the right direction.
Google Analytics is only available if you currently have a Google AdSense account. The sign-up process is still invitation only, thanks to a flood of users who jumped on the free service in November 2005. Our invitation took nearly two months to receive. We hope the wait is shorter now that Google has had time to beef up its system. (The service is the result of Google's acquisition of analytics vendor Urchin in March 2005.)
After adding up to five domains to your account and adding a simple piece of code to pages in your sites, you're up and running. It's actually very simple to set up. Google collects visitor data within minutes after your account is set up. The results are immediate, given you have a choice of more than 80 different types of reports with which to analyze what's going on when shoppers visit your site. Even better is the fact that the analytics is automatically tied into your AdWords campaigns. How nice is that?
Google Analytics offers three different report "types": Executive, Marketer and Webmaster. The Executive overview summary is what you might expect it to be. It gives a general report on the performance of your Web site in terms of number of visitors in any given time frame, visits by new and returning visitors, a geographic map overlay showing where in the world your visitors are coming from and visits by source (search engine, Web site referral, etc.).
A marketing summary breaks down further the top five referring sites, search engine keywords and campaigns (referral, direct and organic). One of our favorite features is the Site Overlay where Google Analytics downloads a specified page on your site and overlays indicator graphs above or below links on the page that visitors clicked on. It is one more way to determine whether or not your site's layout is working in your favor and which pages are the most popular.
The Content Summary quickly displays the Top Five entrance and exit pages on your site. This shows you the bounce rate of each page — the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only the page they enter your site on.
The second reporting view you have is that of Marketer. This section is a dream for anyone who wants to get their fingernails dirty in crafting and modifying a site's Pay-Per-Click campaign, which can either sap a company's finances or bring floods of buyers.
The Marketer reports let you perform an overall CPC program analysis, look at CPC versus organic conversion, overall keyword conversion, campaign conversion, defined funnel navigation, as well as analyzing entrance bounce rates. Marketing and Content Optimization reports dig even deeper looking at visits and page view tracking, visitor loyalty, visitor segment performance, content performance, Web design parameters (browser versions, languages, connection speeds, etc.) and navigational analysis.
The Webmaster section, in our experience, isn't as useful (almost redundant, actually) as they have fewer reports.
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| Google's Analytics control panel is your gateway to the inner workings of your e-commerce site. (Click to enlarge) |
While all reports, charts and graphs are viewable directly through Google's site, you also have the option of downloading your data in XML, CSV or text formats — perfect for firing off important data to your marketing director or boss.
We used Google Analytics to track two separate sites over the course of six weeks and found it to be much more feature-rich and useful than other ISP-provided stats packages. During that time, we never saw any glitches or delays in reporting.
Google's free Analytics isn't designed to replace the giants in the Web analytics industry like Webtrends or Web Side Story, which are so refined and powerful they can practically tell you how many cavities your site's visitors have. But they also cost thousands of dollars. What it does do is give smaller e-commerce and other Web sites much needed insight into how a site is — or isn't — working. Just having the ability to find out what keywords are driving users to your site is priceless.
If you're currently stuck with an ISP that gives you monthly reports containing little more than visitor numbers and you can't figure out why buyers are staying away from your online store, then using Google Analytics is a no-brainer — as long as you know what to look for and have the know-how to make effective changes to your site. If not, you might be better off hiring a Web marketing expert.
Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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