Part of your daily or weekly duties is to view the web statistics of your site. Yahoo! generates and supplies a large number of site statistics that reflect activity on your storefront. You will want to know things such as how many visitors came to your website; how many visitors came this month compared to last month or same month last year; which products are being viewed the most; which products are being viewed the least; how effective your marketing campaign is; whether the newspaper advertisement you paid for drove additional traffic to your site; and whether you received any traffic from search engines, and if so which ones and which keywords shoppers used to find you. All these questions can be answered by reviewing your site statistics. To view site statistics
So how will these statistics help your business? For example, when viewing the number of visitors to your site, you will be able to view how well your site is doing over a period of time. This will give you insight on how much traffic your site is getting. Is the site traffic increasing or decreasing? Is the marketing campaign working or not working? Are you receiving the expected Return on Investment (ROI) on that particular advertising campaign? If the data is mined properly, you will be able to answer all these questions. Let's take a look at a few statistical reports from PaperModelsOnline.com. Search Engine Keyword ReportYou can view which keywords or keyword phrases your customers are using to search for your site. As shown in Figure 14.11, you see a list of keywords used and how many times that keyword was used. The search engine keyword report is crucial if you are implementing a search engine optimization strategy. You can see which keywords you successfully optimized for and which keywords need some additional optimization. Figure 14.11. You can view reports such as which search engines are sending you traffic and what keywords customers are using to find your site.Referring URLs ReportAnother powerful site activity report is the referring URL report, as shown in Figure 14.12. This will give you a list of other websites that are sending you traffic. If link trading is part of your strategy, this will show you a list of which sites are sending you traffic, and how much. This can help you decide where to place their reciprocal link, or determine which sites you need to renegotiate with for better link placement. Figure 14.12. Referring URL reports can help you determine the success of your link exchange campaign. The report will list websites that link to your page.You can also find out who is linking to your website by going to www.google.com and typing in "link:www.yourdomain.com". Page Views ReportYou can view the number of page views for individual pages as seen in Figure 14.13, or you can get a summary of all page views for the entire site. Page view reports are great for calculating the ROI of a particular page. For product pages, you can view how many sales were generated compared to how many page views for that product. This is helpful when determining whether you need to make changes to the product page to increase its sales rate. Tip: When you first view your stats, create a baseline report and date it. This will allow you to create your own statistical reports on the progress of your site for future use. Figure 14.13. Page view reports show which pages are generating the most amount of traffic and which pages are generating the least amount of traffic. The report will display the exact number of page views for each individual page. |