Using Analytics to Your Advantage: Yahoo! Web Analytics Tips From Michael Whitaker

Today’s Y!Store blog is a guest column by Michael Whitaker, CEO of Monitus, which is located in Mill Valley, CA. Michael develops tools for Yahoo! Stores, blogs about Yahoo! Store and analytics, occasionally has seminars about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of two Yahoo! Store books.

I had the great pleasure to speak on the Data-driven Decision-Making panel at the recent Yahoo! Merchant Summit in Boston. As always seems to be the case, there wasn’t enough time to cover everything, so I foolishly offered to write up a list of analytics tips. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope that it will provide at least some food for thought, and help you think about ways you can start using web analytics to your advantage.

Here are some basic tips I recommend for online retailers getting started with web analytics:

1. Add revenue metrics to reports wherever possible.

Revenue basically tells a more compelling story than conversion rate alone. Increasing your conversion rate may be a good proxy for success, but ultimately it’s about increasing revenue. Revenue also provides the basis and context for what you might want to improve on your site.

Let’s take keywords as an example. Suppose you have two different keywords, one with a conversion rate of 10% and the other 2%. If I give you the option of increasing both conversion rates by 20%, which keyword would you choose to optimize? The first one looks like a sure bet because your conversion rate would go up to 12%, whereas the second one would only go up to 2.4%. But what if you bring revenue into the equation? Let’s now assume that the first keyword generates $1,000 in revenue, but the second one contributes $10,000. The picture looks different now and you’d clearly pick the second keyword as it would make you an additional $2,000 instead of $200. Perhaps this is just stating the obvious, but your optimization efforts should take into account revenue and not just conversion rate.

This is of course not just about your best keywords. You also want to know your top landing and content pages, top traffic sources, top products, etc., all in terms of revenue. For more on this subject, check out Dennis R. Mortensen’s VisualRevenue blog article, "Using a Page Revenue Participation metric for Conversion Optimization."

One other note about this example. Notice that I have given you a choice to optimize one thing or the other. Sorry, but you can’t optimize both as you just don’t have the time! Seriously though, you cannot do everything, you cannot look at 80 reports, you cannot write great unique content for thousands of pages. You have to focus your efforts where you will get the best return. I will return to this theme again.

2. How do I add revenue metrics?

Here is a simple process you can follow: Pick a standard report, e.g., Navigation > Entries > By URL. This shows your entry/landing pages with visits and page views. Good traffic info, but we can do better. Next click on "Customize Report." Choose a revenue metric and drag into the main section. Hit "Save." By all means play around with this function and add other metrics that you might be interested in. Once you have a report you like, click on "Bookmark Report" and give it a meaningful title. This report will now be listed in the Bookmarks section in the left navigation.

Repeat the same process to build other reports. Standard Report > Customize Report > Add interesting metric > Bookmark report. Doing this also has another huge benefit. Once you’ve created a few powerful bookmarked reports you can almost ignore all the other standard reports! Instead of having dozens of reports, you can now focus on a select number of reports. Every once in a while you will want to do a deep dive into other reports, but having just a few key bookmarked reports is far more manageable.

Bonus tip: Send those bookmarked reports to yourself by email on a regular schedule. I am a big believer in prioritizing tasks by using reminder and to-do lists. Let’s face it; you’re busy, and life gets in the way, and you forget to check your analytics. So have the analytics come to you, perhaps once a week on a Friday. You can get extra fancy by using alerts, which will only send you email if a certain condition has been, such as an abnormal increase in traffic. To learn more about setting up alerts, you can consult this online help page.

3. Too much data. What to do?

See tip 2 and use a few bookmarked reports as opposed to looking at 80 different reports. It’s important that you set yourself goals that are actually attainable, and for that you have to ask yourself specific questions. If your goal is to increase your global conversion rate, where do you start? This question is far too vague and broad to elicit action. How about: "Let’s look at the top keywords driving traffic to my top landing page. It would appear that the third keyword contributes almost no revenue and has a high bounce rate. Let’s check the text on the page to see if the page is actually relevant for this term. Let’s also check where the traffic came from to see if we spot something." This is a specific problem that can you attempt to solve.

The name of the game is segmentation. Although we tend to look at overall conversion rate, it is not very actionable. The fact is that you have many, many different conversion rates, for landing pages, keywords, products, campaigns, etc. Don’t use site-wide averages – segment your traffic into meaningful buckets. Ask specific goal-oriented questions that get you to take action. YWA is chock-full of segmentation options and you can even segment by gender, age and some behavioral demographics.

Bonus tip: use the merchandising capabilities (located in the Settings menu) to bucket products into product categories. Simply upload a CSV file to YWA to associate products with categories (you can use a relatively simple breadcrumb RTML template to help you generate this file). The reason why you might want to do this is because it is easier to optimize, say, 20 product categories, than it is to optimize 2,000 products. Or at least the task will not seem as daunting.

4. Go for easy wins

Site Search

I love looking at internal site search data. These are the keywords that visitors enter in your site search box to look for information. Are visitors finding the content they’re looking for? Are they using different words than you do to describe a particular product? Try to incorporate the words your visitors use into your copy so that they will get a more relevant result. I also love the Zero Results Internal Searches report; this shows you the site search queries that resulted in no results being shown. One actual example I can share is the case of visitors looking for a brand that the retailer was not carrying. This definitely qualifies as actionable data because you can either start carrying that brand or suggest viable alternatives.

Bonus tip: Segment your site search keywords against referring keywords, i.e., those keywords that brought traffic to your site from paid or organic campaigns. For PPC keywords in particular, are visitors using site search on the landing page? If they do, this could suggest that you’re not sending traffic to the best spot.

Bonus tip two: If you add a revenue metric to the site search page, you may find that it has relatively low traffic, but accounts for a significant amount of revenue. Don’t treat site search as an afterthought.

Track 404 pages

Hopefully you get lots of traffic from search engines and other sources, but you also delete and create new content all the time. And of course it does happen that other sites link to pages on your site that no longer exist. In this case visitors will see a 404 page aka "sorry page not found." (You do have a 404 error page set up, right?) With a pretty simple technique, you can track in your analytics reports when those 404 pages are generated, along with the referrer info. I send myself this report every day.

5. What are your favorite analytics reports?

In tip 2 I suggested to start off with a standard report: Navigation > Entries > By URL and to add a revenue metric. But we can do one better than that. Customize this report again and drag the referring keywords dimension to the left column. This will now give you the top landing pages and the top keywords in one report! Not only is that very cool, but also very useful. These are the questions you can now ask: Are my SEO or PPC efforts working effectively? Are you trying to optimize for certain keywords that just don’t work on the landing page (by having a high bounce rate or low revenue participation rate)? If you think of matching or exceeding your visitors’ expectations in terms of content, good things will happen! Resist the temptation to optimize for too many keywords per landing page.

I also very much like to get a sense of where visitors go AFTER they have landed on your site. If the landing page is a section page, where do they click next? I’ve often seen that if you have a typical section page with a couple of dozen of product thumbnails in three columns, then the three thumbnails in the first row will get the clicks! Now, how did you decide how to order these products in the first place? Random or in alphabetic order? Why not arrange them in order of sales? Another way to look at this is that your visitors will click on the first three links, so you’d better show them the links you want them to go to.

Extend this idea to the main product navigation. There is no rule that says that you have to list your main product categories in alphabetical order. Consider putting your most important categories first and gently guide your visitors to where you would like them to go!

6. Be goal-oriented

Setting goals for yourself or your company is pretty much common sense, but you can extend this approach to web analytics. Having a bounce rate of 45% or 55% is not necessarily good or bad – what’s important is that you improve metrics over time, to go from a 55% bounce rate to 45%, for example. Trends are more important than absolute values. Set yourself an attainable target to improve ______________ [fill in the blank] over time. Goals in YWA are called ACTIONS and you have a number of prebuilt actions at your disposal, with ACTION = 01 SALE being the one you ultimately care about. But the way to increase sales is not always direct and you should also track "mini-goals," such as newsletter subscription rates. Not every visitor is in the market when they visit your site and could be in research mode instead, so perhaps you can try to sign them up for your newsletter. Or perhaps a customer comes back to your site to look for shipment tracking, so you could measure how effectively she can find the information. You should help your visitors find the information they need even if it’s not related to making a sale conversion. Another way to think of this is that visitors will interact with your visit across multiple visits and many different channels. Improving these mini-goals will help your business over time and hopefully turn prospects into customers, and then repeat customers.

Feel free to contact me with your analytics questions. — Cheers, Michael.

Michael Whitaker
CEO, Monitus
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Rob Snell Gives the Scoop on SMX Advanced

Today’s Y!Store blog is yet another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who has sold dog training collars on his Yahoo! Store since 1997. Rob also blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of Starting a Yahoo! Store For Dummies.

Just back from Seattle & SMX Advanced

Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is one of Danny Sullivan’s many search marketing shows. The Seattle show, SMX Advanced, is labeled that way so the speakers can dive off pretty deep into some pretty heavy topics without worrying about leaving the new folks behind. This show, like PUBCON, is for the heavy search geeks!

The programming at SMX Advanced was so intense, I couldn’t justify partying like a rock star and risk missing some new important nugget or idea. This was the first search conference EVER where I went to every single class. I only slept in through the keynote.

SMX Advanced is also a 2-day show, but I took 79+ pages of notes in my little black Moleskine notebook. More than half of my notes were ideas for getting links, or increasing conversions, or other marketing ideas triggered by something someone said in a presentation or during a bar conversation. Some of my SEO friends tease me about my little black notebook, but it’s ironic that they’re the first ones to call me to get copies of my notes!

Nothing is radically new this year

I’ve been going to search marketing shows since 2001, and the more I go to, the fewer brand new things I tend to pick up. For me, the major advantage of attending is seeing the same information in a somewhat different light, meeting like-minded folks at meals and in between sessions, and catching up with old friends. Search marketing shows are also great for getting out of your daily routine, letting your mind wander, and figuring out what you want to do next, marketing-wise!

A buddy of mine was bellyaching that “he paid $3500 for flight, hotel and tuition, and he didn’t learn anything radically new.” Did he get any ideas? “Yes, tons.” Great. Now he also knows his SEO chops are completely current.

In 2009, SEO is still all about TITLE TAGS and LINKS

As you probably know, on every page you want your best keywords for that page in a descriptive TITLE Tag. Yahoo! Stores are SEO-friendly right out of the box because TITLES are generated by the NAME field, or PAGE-TITLE field.

You also want the same keywords you want to rank for in the anchor text of links pointing to that page. These links should be both from your Yahoo! Store (navigation, breadcrumbs, links in CAPTION fields, and thumbnails/text links on category pages) as well as from lots of other sites. For more info check out some earlier posts of mine: Converting Keywords, Southern-Fried SEO, and How to Get Vendor Links.

What IS new in SEO for 2009?

Link diversity

Link diversity (having links from different domains and different IP ranges) is somewhat more important for SEO than it has been in the past. For example, 20 links from one site isn’t as good as 20 links from 20 different sites on different domains.

Want to see how many unique domains link to you? Check out SEOBook.com’s Aaron Wall’s tool here: http://tools.seobook.com/link-tools/backlinks/backlinks.php.

Want to see Ystoreblog.com’s backlinks? (May take a bit to load!)

I show 1 Unique Government Domain (*.gov, *.mil) with 1 Unique C Block Addresses and 74 Unique Commerical Domains (*.com, *.net, etc) with 59 Unique C Block Addresses.

One of the SEO superheroes, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ.org, discussed the upcoming release of his 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors report, which is coming out this July (here’s the last one). Every year or so, Rand surveys top SEOs and compares their opinions with real data from reverse engineering top-ranking sites for hundreds of popular keywords. This year, “Everything’s the same + link diversity” sums up my notes. Rand said he believes that even "nofollowed" links (links that don’t pass PageRank or anchor text) DO count towards domain diversity.

Nofollowed links are links that have the attribute “rel=nofollow”, which was something the search engines invented to stop blog spammers. Nofollowed links really don’t give you any SEO benefit because they don’t send PageRank (link popularity) or anchor text. For example, all the links in comments on this blog are nofollowed.

Duplicate content and the Canonical Tag

One new thing Google and the other search engines came up with earlier this year to help ecommerce sites battle same site duplicate content problems was to come up with the Canonical tag. Matt Cutts has a great post on everything you need to know about the canonical tag right here.

Ironically, Yahoo! Stores don’t need canonical tags because we have SEO-friendly static URLs (like www.storedomain.com/page.html), so our stores don’t have the problems that a lot of other carts do like dealing with dynamic URLS with all these parameters.

Also, you should consolidate all your pages into one domain using the Store Manager’s 301 settings. This permanently redirects all store URLs and your non-www URLs to a single domain, which consolidates your link popularity. Read this helpful Domain Redirect Setting help file for more info.

Oh, yeah! One possible Yahoo! Store use for the canonical tag is so you get SEO credit for links tagged with parameters like links from some affiliate programs, click track, internal campaigns, or even tagged banners.

For example, search engines would see a link to http://www.storedomain.com?s=affiliate&id=8675309 as a completely different link than http://www.storedomain.com. I have some SEO tests running right now, and I’ll report back if/when we find something.

PageRank Sculpting (Just say no!)

In the “you shouldn’t play with fire” category, was the PageRank Sculpting controversy. Sculpting PageRank is the practice of using NOFOLLOW tags to squeeze PageRank around on your site to maximize your link popularity on only your most important products and pages. That sounds like a good thing, right?

Nope! 99.9% of Yahoo! Store owners shouldn’t even think of messing around with PageRank sculpting because it’s not unlike like shaving with a chainsaw. Horrible things can happen if you do something wrong. The best way to control what pages get the PageRank on your Yahoo! Store is to put links to your most valuable products and categories right on your homepage. That’s so easy!

Google still hates paid links

Matt Cutts, Google’s Search Quality Engineer and the voice of Google to most SEOs, repeated that buying links to manipulate the search engine rankings is still a high-risk activity. He said anything sponsored should use a rel=nofollow tag or it’s high-risk. Any consideration (i.e., free products for links) to get keyword rich anchor text links with the intent to manipulate rankings is high-risk. Matt said you’re free to do as you wish with your sites and your links, but so is The Google.

Google also says they won’t penalize you for anything someone else could do to your site, only things that you do ON your site. Google can be pretty cryptic about what will and won’t get you in trouble! For example, if buying paid links got you banned from Google (or even penalized), all a competitor would have to do is buy paid links for YOUR site, report you, and then you would suffer and probably not know why.

My experience with buying paid links (from long, long ago!) was that the site that gets caught SELLING (not buying) paid links gets in trouble. Google most likely quietly turns off that site from any SEO benefits of passing PR and anchor text. Buying links from that site then is a waste of money, and you also run the risk of having your domain flagged as a possible spammer. This may lead to a manual review which is when a Google Quality inspector puts your site under the microscope to see if you’re doing anything else you shouldn’t be doing and gets to assess penalties if applicable.

(Now my dog is hiding under the bed, whimpering like it’s the middle of a Mississippi thunderstorm. It’s okay. Matt Cutts isn’t going to eat you!)

My own personal rule for SEO? I pretend Matt Cutts knows who I am, and knows all my domains and client sites. If you assume the Spam Cops are watching everything, keep your nose clean, and you should be fine.

Anytime I try to keep anything on the down low, it’s to hide things that work from my distinguished competition rather than trying to get anything past the PhDs in Mountain View.

I still have 73 more pages of notes I didn’t get to, so hopefully the Merchant Solutions gang will let me have another guest post pretty soon! Appreciate the forum, folks!

Until then, keep building great content and collecting links!

P.S. Here are some other posts: Pimping Your Product Page, SES NYC 2007, Free Conversion Rate Chapter.

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

The Danger of Relying on Price Promotions to Boost Conversion Rates

Today’s Y! Store Blog post comes from Scott Smigler, president of Exclusive Concepts, a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer partner that specializes in conversion optimization and advanced SEO. Scott is one of the first visionaries to specialize in online retail marketing and has dedicated over half his life to the study and practice of converting online shoppers into loyal buyers.

As online retailers, I’m sure that few things frustrate you more than the matter of conversion rates. Most online retailers experience conversion rates below 2%, meaning that less than 2 out of every 100 shoppers actually make a purchase. While many dream of a magic bullet that will get that conversion rate number up, I’m here to tell you that no such "easy button" exists – except for one. It’s a two-word phrase that should send shivers down your spine: price promotions.

In the context of retail marketing, price promotions, typically in the form of coupons, have proven to be highly effective marketing tools for retailers hoping to attract new and existing customers to their store. That, after all, is the role of a promotion – to stimulate activity by making special offers to your target customer base.

The problem occurs, however, when these "special" offers become the status quo such that customers expect them 100% of the time. Thus they become "expected" offerings, rather than "special" offerings. Not only does this impact future conversion rates negatively as promotions lose their luster, it can also impact your branding as customers begin to think of you as "the place people go to when they want the cheapest price." For those of you snickering, "That would be a good thing!," I implore you to think about the long-term consequences of holding such a position in the minds of your customers.

There are many ways to boost your conversion rates. For example, you could spend your time optimizing the usability of your site, personalizing its content to users using segmentation strategies, or make long-term investments in branding. These are marketing strategies that complement and enhance your existing business strategy.

Quick Tip: Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store merchants can use Yahoo! Web Analytics to start improving conversion rates today. Using YWA, you can identify the most popular pages on your site that have poor bounce rates and look at the keywords and navigation paths that bring people to those pages. Then, you can use this information to improve the content and messaging on the pages in question to improve conversion rates and quickly increase revenue. See below for several screen shots from Yahoo! Web Analytics.

When you rely on price promotions to boost conversion rates, however, there are implications not just to your marketing strategy, but to your overall business strategy as well. The harsh reality from a business strategy point-of-view is that most retailers cannot consistently offer price promotions without eroding their margins and jeopardizing their long-term viability.

Yes, Wal-Mart mastered the art of always offering their customers the best deal by making the low-cost promise and keeping it, but unless you can become the Wal-Mart of your category, you’ll soon learn the perils of price competition. Wal-Mart, in fact, put thousands of retailers who relied on price as their sole differentiator out of business, and online retailers who do not learn from those lessons may face a similar fate.

Looking forward, if you put all or most of your eggs in the price promotions basket, a time will probably come when you will have to raise your prices in order to stay in business and make a healthy profit (unless your business strategy changes such that you can consistently undercut your competitors on price – which few companies can pull off). When that time comes, your customers will have been trained to look for special promotions. Failing to offer these promotions will in fact alienate a portion of your customer base that enjoyed shopping your site for deals.

In response, you may use another tactic that has become far too common in the world of retail: the fake promotion. For example, you may list the sale price for an item on your site as being 5% higher than it normally would be, only to allow customers to bring that inflated price down 5% by using one of your price promotions. These tactics worked very well 20 years ago, but given that you’ve built a business by catering to "deal shoppers," you can count on them to do their homework and find that your bottom-line prices are no longer the most attractive.

Then, your customers will abandon you – not because the only thing they value in a merchant is price, but because the only thing you’ve taught them to value about you is price.

A brand is all about the promises you make to your customers and the consistency with which you keep those promises. Thus, if you make the decision to use price promotions as the dominant tactic through which you improve conversion rates, you will undoubtedly begin to brand your company in a way that relates to low prices. That low price position becomes your promise, and when you fail to keep that promise, your customers will have no other reason to be loyal to you.

At the end of the day, yes, price promotions are powerful tools to stimulate revenue. Used appropriately, they could be a boon for your business, but if used hastily, they could lead your business to bust. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a trend among small business retailers of becoming over-reliant on price promotions to boost conversion rates when so many other techniques are just as effective, or more effective, and are certainly more friendly to the bottom line.

Quick Tip: One way to be smarter about your price promotions is to utilize single-use coupons, a feature that is offered through your Yahoo! Store. Single-use coupons allow you to target your promotions to specific users or groups of users more precisely than "all time discounting."

Also, be careful about using coupon codes in ways similar to the example below where the coupon can be distributed throughout the Internet such that you don’t know which promotion is responsible for which sale. Single-use coupon codes solve this problem.

If, as a small business, you have an opportunity to compete by offering some value other than low prices in a way that allows you to grow profitably, I suggest turning that opportunity into a reality. You can start by improving your site’s usability; the fastest, most sustainable approach to improving conversion rates that I’ve found in 12 years of optimizing online retail stores.

My Recommended Approach: A Roadmap

Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that indiscriminately using price promotions as a conversion lever is not the right approach. Here’s the approach that I do recommend.

Step 1: If you haven’t already done proper business planning, now is a good time.

Analysis and Strategy

Analysis is critical to planning your business and marketing strategy. I recommend that you start by asking yourself questions like:

• Who are my most profitable customers?
• What is the opportunity to grow sales by focusing more on these customers?
• Why would one of these customers choose me over one of my competitors?
• Who are my least profitable customers?
• Should I continue targeting them?

It’s also valuable to conduct a "SWOT" analysis whereby you assess your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

It’s critical that you have concrete business goals and a specific strategy for growing your business. After you’ve identified your most significant opportunities for growth, you can focus your attention accordingly. Over the long-term this is critical to boosting your conversion rates.

Step 2: Focus on tactics that will further your strategy while boosting conversion rates.

Now that you know your target customers and what benefits you can offer them that differentiate you from your competitors, you can focus on implementation and execution.

If you’re an established online retailer, a good place to start is multivariate testing.

Through multivariate testing, you will be able to systematically improve aspects of your store inclusive of, but not exclusive to:

• Messaging
• Usability
• Merchandising

If your store caters to multiple customer segments, you can cater to each segment with the optimal combination of messaging, usability, and merchandising techniques for that particular segment.

If you’re just starting out, you will want to adopt best practices in conversion optimization.

Multivariate testing is only a viable option if your site generates enough traffic to test multiple aspects of the user-experience and get "statistically valid" results. If you’re just starting out, you won’t have enough traffic to run these tests. In this case, you’ll want to rely on best practices or advice from consultants.

Here are some quick tips:

• Keywords are not just for SEO: If a shopper performs a search on Yahoo! for "wheeled luggage" and they visit your website, they are more likely to stay and shop if your site mentions "wheeled luggage" high up on the page. Make sure that the keywords sending the most traffic to your site are mentioned prominently on your site, and that you offer valuable content to shoppers who find you using those keywords.

  

• Take advantage of conventions: Customers expect to find the "view cart" button on the top right of the page, and they expect the "add to cart" button to stand out. They expect to find your phone number either in the header or the footer, and they expect the site to load quickly. Make sure that your site is not breaking conventions like these, unless it’s for a very good reason. For a deeper look at conventions and why they exist, you may want to check out Mike Ober’s blog article, "Don’t Dare to Be Different in Ecommerce Basics."

  

• Use the tools that Yahoo! gives you: Yahoo! merchants have access to tools such as Cross-Sell’s Auto-Suggest feature, which utilizes Yahoo!’s behavioral targeting technology to make product recommendations based on your store’s sales and navigation histories. This tool keeps track of what shoppers tend to view and/or buy in combination, taking the work out of creating relevant product suggestions. Installing tools like this takes only a few minutes, and can have a big impact on conversion rates.

Whether you’re an established merchant or you’re just getting started, investing the time to devise a strategic approach to improving your conversion rates will pay significant long-term dividends.

Scott Smigler
President, Exclusive Concepts, Inc.
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business
Follow Scott on Twitter

Dennis R. Mortensen talks about his new Web Analytics book and recent Yahoo! Web Analytics release

Today’s post is an interview with Dennis R. Mortensen, who sat down with us to talk about his brand new Web Analytics book, published by Wiley, and the recent release of Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Dennis is a pioneer and expert in the Analytics industry. He is an accredited Associate Web Analytics Instructor at the University of British Columbia, the author of Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights, and a frequent speaker on the subject of analytics and online marketing. An entrepreneur, Dennis was the COO of IndexTools until it was acquired by Yahoo! in May 2008. Today he is the Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!, sits on the Board of Directors at the Web Analytics Association, and maintains the highly popular analytics blog, VisualRevenue.

New features for Yahoo! Web Analytics were recently released. For Merchant Solutions customers, these included new demographics and interest groups reports, along with segmentation and cross-reference filter capabilities. What kinds of insights can merchants gain from these new features?

I honestly believe that there is an unlimited amount of insight that one can gain from this. The biggest barrier to a successful analytics practice within your company is not the analytics technology anymore – it’s likely to be the amount of time you, as a merchant, dedicate to the process. I, of course, believe that this is one of those processes that you should force upon yourself or your team, and that it should be no less than a weekly activity.

What I really like about the new release is the opportunity for merchants of all sizes to gain detailed insight and information on the demographics of their leads and customers, and that this information can be segmented down to individual products or groups. This is typically something that is exclusive to the enterprise company. Imagine the ability to get understanding and insight such as:

Target Segment for Product X = Female New Yorkers between the age of 18-24 with high interest in sports!

If that isn’t sexy, I don’t know what is. AND remember, this is something you can go do today. It’s not the only thing you can do, of course, but I believe it shows the value of the new dimensions. The most beautiful part is that we don’t just provide this as pretty reports, but as actual dimensions in the system, so you can use this to slice and dice your data any way you want. Creating a simple report on gender and average order value, as pictured below, is easy and super powerful, showing that the average order value from males are +$100 more than from females.

Report on gender and average order value.

Even with all this data at their fingertips, a hindrance to many busy merchants is lack of time in their day. If you had to pick key metrics that merchants should keep close tabs on in the limited time they have, which would these be, and why?

If you have very limited human resources, I suggest that you rely on Alerts for metrics such as:

• Visit to Sale conversion rate
• Average Order Value
• Traffic Distribution

Make sure that you are keeping an acceptable visit-to-conversion rate while maintaining an acceptable average order value – and should you not, be sure that you are alerted instantly. Finally, knowing that there are no major changes in traffic influx, makes sure that you don’t lose out on a potential opportunity. Remember, alerts aren’t just for negative scenarios.

Create automated alerts to stay on top of your key site metrics.

You recently published the book Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights, a resource that promises to give readers "Yahoo! Web Analytics secrets and tricks not found anywhere else." Which topics covered in your book are a definite "must-read" for online store owners?

My philosophy in regards to Web Analytics as a whole today, is that you should focus on three different but equally important tasks. I have divided the book into those three parts to reflect these broad tasks: A) Collecting Data, B) Reporting on Data and C) Deriving insight from Data. Depending on one’s vantage point, one or more of the chapters will be in focus.

The book of course holds tremendous value for all existing users of the system, and will be a hefty resource for all those new accounts we are setting up these days. BUT I feel it is important to mention that it actually holds great value beyond users of Yahoo! Web Analytics, or this is at least something I tried to author.

Yahoo! Store owners have the luxury of not having to tag their sites manually, so as a first step I would actually recommend Part II about reporting on your data and Part III on deriving insight on your data. Once you master this, to become a true web analyst Ninja (as my good friend Avinash Kaushik would call it), you can go back to part I and look into more sophisticated data collection methodologies. These are the two MUST-read chapters, even though I believe the whole book is a must-read of course:

• Merchandising Tracking (Chapter 4)
• Merchandising Reports (Chapter 10)

That said, I believe that dependant on one’s vantage point, certain chapters will be in focus, such as:

• Campaign Manager: Paid Search Analysis and Optimization with YWA (Chapter 11)
• Web Analyst: Using Segments in YWA Reporting (Chapter 7)
• Manager: Using Dashboards in YWA (Chapter 9)

You can find the official book page on my blog, and you can go get a sneak peek of the book at Google Book Search or over at Amazon.

Front cover of Dennis R. Mortensen’s new Yahoo! Web Analytics book

Yahoo! Web Analytics is available to and used by merchants of all store sizes and experience levels. How helpful is your book to merchants on each part of this spectrum?

I don’t necessarily believe that the book caters to a specific store size or experience level. I am more eager to believe that it depends on the person and what they want out of it. I left nothing out from a feature set point of view and as such it is indeed sophisticated in its attitude, but I tried to include examples and use a language that makes it pleasant to read. I believe the bellowing two testimonials might confirm that:

"As the individual who drove the initial development of Yahoo!’s Web Analytics tool, Dennis managed to conquer mind-numbingly complex issues by presenting them in a simple and useful way. It’s no wonder that he did it again with his Yahoo! Web Analytics book."

Bryan Eisenberg,
New York Times bestselling author of Call to Action and Always Be Testing, and cofounder of FutureNow Inc.

"In Yahoo! Web Analytics Dennis Mortensen manages to do the impossible by adding real value to our knowledge of web analytics in an already crowded market. His clear language and excellent examples make this book required reading for any web analytics practitioner interested in extending their use of freely-available tools. Dennis is one of the best and brightest in the web analytics industry and Yahoo! Web Analytics reinforces that with every page."

Eric T. Peterson,
Author, Web Analytics Demystified

Thanks, Dennis, for taking the time to talk with us about your new Web Analytics book, and the recent Yahoo! Web Analytics release.

For merchants attending Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Boston next week, you can talk to Dennis about Yahoo! Web Analytics in-person – be sure to stop by the Yahoo! booth (#449). Dennis will also be presenting at the inaugural Yahoo! Merchant Summit, being held in conjunction with IRCE on June 18.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business