Shopping Cart & Ecommerce Blog » Tracking

Keyword trends in Google Analytics

Mark — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:52:17 +0000

I’m a Google Analytics junkie. I admit it. I just love the product. However, despite my desire to procreate with it, it does have some significant limitations. One of those limitations has just been removed.

Ever wanted to know keyword trends? Which keywords are having unusual spikes or dips? I sure do. You can now get a keyword trends report in Google Analytics courtesy of this groovy little greasemonkey script. I love it!

Understanding bounce rate

Mark — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:54:11 +0000

Bounce rate is a deceivingly powerful metric in your analytics report. MarketingProfs recently published a very thorough but easy to read article on bounce rates. Highly recommended.

You’re stupid (but so am I)

Mark — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 05:28:42 +0000

I was doing some work with a client recently. We were looking at their homepage and trying to work out how to optimize the amount of traffic going to one important section of the site. I looked at the homepage, and decided the best thing to do was change the link text as it was a little ambiguous. At first I thought “Oh this is sure to increase click throughs, I’ll just do it”. I consulted with a people who all agreed that the change was a definite improvement.

However, I decided I should do an A/B test, showing one text to half the users, and the other to the other half of users, and tracking how many of them clicked on the link. Full of pride, I wanted to be able to prove my infinite cleverness and demonstrate how much I improved click throughsÂ with one simple change. Would it be 10%? 25%? 50%? Who knows! I was getting excited.

After running the test for a few days, I had enough data for an answer.Â And the result was… a staggering -26% improvement. A great number, except that pesky minus sign at the front. Yes, my content genius had decreased click throughs by 26%.

The point here is that despite my experience in this field, I am still consistently wrong. I wish I could say this was an unusual event but it’s not. The more I test, the more I realize I just don’t know the answer. It’s not just me. I spoke at a conference a while ago to a bunch of site owners. I showed them three versions of a site and asked them to guess which one would have the best sales. About 80% of them picked the same one, which was the same one I had picked when I first saw it. It also happens that one was, by quite a margin, the worst performing of the three. So, don’t guess, test. It pays off – quite literally.

Google ads vs Yahoo ads: which works best?

Mark — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 09:03:15 +0000

One of the most famous quotes in advertising which most people have heard is:

â€œHalf my advertising is wasted, the trouble is I donâ€™t know which half.â€

Never have truer words been spoken. Except… that doesn’t have to be true any more.Â One of the great things about online advertising is that, with the right tools, you can work out exactly how effective every single last cent spent is. It’s an advertisers dream! So there’s no need to argue about which online ad is better – Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), or any other type of advertising – one of the other ad networks, direct advertising or whatever.

All you need is a decent web analytics package (hint: Google Analytics is perfect for this, and free) and a bit of time and expertise to set it up and you can work out which ad, often even which version of which ad (eg. which headline) resulted in the most sales. More later…

Tracking with CrazyEgg

Mark — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:07:01 +0000

One of the things that is hard with any site, but especially an ecommerce site, is working out what people do on your site. Good statistics go a long way, and usability studies are great – but expensive and time consuming. One tool I’ve used a few times recently and am in fact using on my own site is Crazy Egg. They have a really neat tracking tool which has the nicest looking and easiest to use reports I’ve seen from any tracking tool. Check out their site and look at some of the sample reports. It’s really as easy and cool as it looks, no catches. For smaller/lower traffic sites, it’s free as well! I put it on an ecommerce site I was working with and found out all sorts of information. I managed to get rid of a couple of elements that almost no one was using and improved some bits not getting used much that I wanted to get used. If there’s another way to get high quality data with that little effort and cost, let me know about it!

And, I have no connection with CrazyEgg, just a happy user.