There’s an old saying that goes something like: “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”. While PPC marketing is a highly competitive industry by nature, keeping your competitors close to you may be easier than you think. Performing a simple competitive analysis on a routine basis will help you uncover your competitors’ deepest […]
…at least in a Yahoo! Store with the optional cross-sell feature. Average order values are consistently higher for this retailer: Note that the cross-sell traffic segment includes only visitors who have clicked on a cross-sell link. It's not an AB test, but I think it does show that Yahoo!'s cross-sell algorithm does a good job […]
I am a big fan of Google Analytics’ event tracking feature and I think all web analytics programs should have that capability. There is one feature that would make event tracking even more useful in my opinion. In addition to Category, Action and Label, you can send an event value, but this is supposed to […]
From the excellent Neuromarketing blog comes a great post entitled "Order Effect Affects Orders" that shows that you should put your most important items first, because that's what people will click on and buy. In other words, the item in position 0 should get more clicks than the one in position 6 on this sample […]
Love it when web analytics data paints a clear picture (even if it is not a pretty one). I was happily segmenting data in the quest for actionable insights when I came across segmentation by page type (hat tip to Gabriel), specifically for e-commerce sites. Outside of the homepage you typically have two main types […]
Time to look at some data after gathering checkout error data for a while. Surprise #1 43% of all transactions had at least one error message during checkout. I expected there to be fewer although I don't know why. Surprise #2 Seeing an error message does not necessarily mean that those people don't convert. In […]
I know I know, comparing data from different sources will give me different results, but what if the values of my report are binary: 0 or 1, yes or no, new or return visitor, female or male? In this case I don' care as much about the absolute occurrences of Zeroes and Ones, but rather […]
Love the flexibility of event tracking. Very quick to set up and I can send the data without having to specify ahead of time what the data has to look like. Event tracking reports are also conveniently separate from the standard reports, so no need to bend the system by creating "fake pageviews" to track […]
Don't mean to sound alarmist, but according to Yahoo!'s very cool Site Explorer there are literally 1000s of Yahoo! Stores that still have a bad link to their shopping cart page. A while ago, Yahoo! made a change to their checkout URLs – going from order.store.yahoo.com to order.store.yahoo.net. The actual add to cart functionality was automatically […]
Big hat tip to Joe Megibow for providing the inspiration for this post. At the recent eMetrics conference Joe talked about how Expedia is listening to their customers and using web analytics and monitoring techniques to fix problems with their site, particularly in the checkout process. Especially for online retailers fixing and reducing checkout problems […]
