If you are considering or have begun to invest in a start up eCommerce website whose purpose is marketing and promoting a product or service, you will have become aware of the many factors involved in an eCommerce web site’s financial success. Have you considered how to make that business grow by systematically improving your website design, links, advertising, best seo hosting and other efforts?
Additionally, have you considered how you will measure the success of these changes to determine some measure of ROI for your efforts? You are or will soon become aware of page designs, costs per click, conversion rates, SEO, page rankings, “Adwords,” page links and much more.
You’re ROI for changes directed at improving your websites success are “individually” measurable with Web Analytics tools. Web Analytics tools will help you to determine what is working and what is not. If you don’t know who and why potential customers visit your site and why they do or do not buy your products, you are flying blind on the Web.
There are many web analytics tools that are particularly meant for online businesses like seo server and oscommerce seo. Fortunately, these tools are readily available combined into various tool packages to be installed on you’re computers, purchased from your web server or as a SaaS product like SEO consulting firm.
Some Web Analytics examples are:
- Hits: The number of times each element of your website is requested by visitors.
- Visitors: Because it can distinguish users, “visitors” is a better measurement than hits.
- Unique visitors: Obtained by the use of IP addresses, browsers and cookies this data is an indication of your site’s success with search engines and SEO content.
If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues in –
- Entry page: In some cases this page is not the home page but another page which may actually have better SEO value and SEO reseller plans information.
- Next pages: This data shows the effectiveness of the page links that you want people to follow to view more than one page. If the sitemap page dominates, your links need work
- Exit page: This data may indicate any pages that have content that failed to capture the visitor’s attention or fill their expectations.
- Bounce rate: This represents the visitors per who entered on any web page but left without going to another page on the site. A high bounce rate suggests page link problems.
- Conversions: The number of visitors who completed the required procedure to do business with you on your website. This includes buying a product, filling out a contact form or calling any toll free or fax number available.
- Abandonment: This numbers of clients lost in the middle of a conversion procedure on your website. Shopping cart or contact forms are the most important parts of an ecommerce website; therefore, if the number of clients that fill the shopping cart and then abandon the site is large this is a problem that must be addressed.
- Location: Notes the country, state and city of each visitor.
- Search Keywords: This tool shows the words or phrases used in search engines that led people to your site.
- Referrals or Traffic Sources: These are the websites from which your visitors come – search engines like Google or Yahoo or directories or other paid sites. This data helps you make decisions on where and how to promote your future efforts.
- Sessions: A Session is a record of one visitor’s browsing through your site including entry page, links and exit page. Short sessions indicate that your site is not very targeted. Alternatively, long sessions might indicate that the clients could not find what they were looking for.
Each web analytics package is different in features, price and learning curve but often start up businesses opt to use Google Analytics web property id or similar software that free, feature rich, and not too complicated to learn. There are certainly other choices, but there are a number of web analytics results that are fairly basic.
