I have a love/hate relationship with website analytics (the programs or software that tell you how many visitors you get to your site, where they come from, what search terms they used, what pages they visit, etc.) They give you a detailed view of what your users are doing on your site in real time.
Which is great. But all the data can be a bit overwhelming -- how to sort through it, and which data you should pay attention to among the mass of stats available.
So I won't kid you -- I probably don't look at this data as much, or in as much depth, as I should. But it really can be a secret weapon to both finding problems with your site and also helping to optimize it for sales. So it is essential to put analytics tracking on your site, and it is worth the time to learn how to look at basic numbers to make sure your site is both really speaking to your visitors and it that it is also working as efficiently as possible in helping you turn a profit as well.
And while years ago I started out with analytics software that I paid for, for many years I've been using Google Analytics. Which offers up not only a huge amount of information about the goings on of the visitors to your site (where they come from, what pages they land on, what keywords they used in a search to find that page, the conversion rate (if you set it up properly for ecommerce tracking), and so much more). And even better -- it is free!
One of the most important parts of using Analytics is to use this information to help identify problems on the site. I tend to track a few basic numbers - how many people are getting to my product pages, and how many of these end up buying. In addition, I also look at bounce rate, how many pages the visitors on average see, how long they are staying on the site, and how many leave within the first 10 seconds. This last group, I'm told by SEO folks who are much more in the know than I, are metrics Google looks at when assessing if your site is of good quality so that it won't be assessed a penalty (this is the whole Panda update issue -- if you don't know what this is, Google it and you will find out how wide sweeping this update has been to try to increase the quality of sites shown in the search engine results (SERPs)
Some Web Analytic Statistics I Look At
Google Analytics is a very deep subject, and I don't hold myself out as any sort of expert. So I won't try to go into to much detail here, but I wanted to share with you some of the basic numbers I look at:
The basic number I always look at is sales conversions - # of sales / # of visitors. I look at this for a minimum of a week time period to get a good feel of whether the site is converting well. What is a good conversion rate? It depends on a lot of factors. The general answer given is about 1% is the standard for good conversion for an ecommerce site. But it can be lower or higher depending on your price point, how targeted your marketing is, etc. Bottom line -- I use it more as a point of comparison. That is, if I see it fall off, I try to look more deeply to see if there is an issue (competitor has lowered prices, I have a glitch on a page, etc)
One other thing I do is to set up a Goal in Google Analytics -- from my product page through to the ultimate sales page. If you don't know how to set up goals, look for details on how to do this in the help section in Google Analytics. By putting in a goal you can then see a funnel visualization that shows how many people start off on your product page, how many get to the cart, and ultimately how many order. And by looking at this over time, you can see if you can increase the flow of people through the funnel by creating better copy, more compelling offers, a better cart page, etc.
Another key stat I look at is the percentage of sales I get from people visiting a particular product page. This is especially key if the site really had one basic product it sells. You can see this percentage in the goal funnel, and again the amount of folks that put a product into a cart really varies depending on price point from 1% - 5% or more.
If I don't have a good conversion for a certain product page, I will look at the time the average user spends on the page. If they spend a very short amount of time (less than 30 seconds), then you can guess they are just shopping price - and your price isn't making it. I had this with my old Radio Flyer wagon site, and after cutting prices to the bone I've was able to increase sales. Ultimately, this wasn't a long term strategy, though, since I couldn't compete on price with big stores using the wagons as a loss leader to get a customer who would buy all sorts of other kids products over time (which is why I closed this site). But if you are intent on trying to compete on price, a key to these type of sites (low margin) is both getting a high conversion rate and fairly low PPC costs for your keywords. Be warned, though, that with lots of Adwords competition these days this is a very difficult trick to pull off since you typically end up bidding more than you would like due to the competition in the ads.
I also track the shopping cart pages. While shopping cart abandonment is a universal problem, it is important to make sure you are maximizing the number of checkouts possible. I upgraded my shopping cart and saw sales conversion go up by over 1/3. In my tracking (based on page visits) I see about a 25% checkout rate (# sales / # of views of the cart page). Again, I look at this alone -- just to see shopping cart abandonment -- and also as part of the funnel.
