Using Click Trails to Optimize Your Site

In the previous post (Are Customers Beating a Path to Your Store?) we looked at the Referrer field in customer orders as one way to see how shoppers are finding your site. In a certain sense that is like reading the first and last chapter of a book—you get the beginning and end without any of the action in the middle. Fortunately, merchants have a means to determine, for the most part, what happens in the middle. The answer is Click Trails.

Click Trails, available with Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional packages, answer the question “What do shoppers do on my site?” While the trails can not be analyzed in aggregate across multiple shoppers, they can provide some additional insight into the behavior of customers on your site.

You can access Click Trails under the Statistics column in the Store Manager. You will see links to the last five days of trails for your store. You will also see links to filter your click trails based on behavior. Here is what is shown and what you can learn from it:

• Total trails: This will be the largest set of data and will include the paths of all customers within your store for the selected day. You can look quickly through these to see where people start within your site, where they go first, and what is the last page viewed. If visitors start on a section page and end on a product page, they may just be comparing prices. If you want to be the price leader on those products, you can use this information to add content explaining that you have the lowest price or you will match the lowest advertised price. Keep in mind though that you need to look at many trails to decide what action to take—one visitor’s path is not representative of all so don’t base any changes on a limited number of observations. Look for trends and patterns you see over and over.
• Trails where order button was pressed: This filters to show only trails where the order button was pressed, noted in the trail by “into shopping basket”. For example:
  Feb 20 15:35:08 Casa e Tavola Front Page
  Feb 20 15:35:13 Table Runners
  Feb 20 15:35:16 Fiesta Table Runners
  Feb 20 15:35:26 70″ Fiesta Table Runner Mayan Purple
  Feb 20 15:37:35 70″ Fiesta Table Runner Mayan Purple into shopping basket
  Feb 20 15:37:35 Show shopping basket This trail shows the visitor started on the home page, went to a section page (table runners), selected a sub-section (Fiesta Table Runners), and viewed and added a specific item to the cart.Look more carefully at orders where the order button was pressed. This shows customers that are likely interested in purchasing products. Sometimes people may just add to cart to see your shipping costs. Are you showing shipping costs in the shopping cart (available with Checkout Manager)? If not, you may wish to consider this. If customers are adding items but not completing checkout, what text or links do you have to convince them ordering is secure and private? If shoppers go to your Info page, they may be looking for more information (refund policy, shipping rates, etc) before purchasing. Add any information that may be missing, or links to the information.
• Trails that resulted in an order: These trails show paths where a shopper completed a purchase. You can use these successful paths to confirm what you are doing well. Compare these trails with those where items were added but not purchased. You can also see if the customer viewed other pages in your site after placing the order. This can help you target cross-sell items if shoppers buying one item consistently look at other items.

As mentioned, there is a lot of information to see in Click Trails. You probably don’t have the time to view them each day or even once a week, but when you have spare time you can use Click Trails as another set of data in optimizing your store.

Happy trails!

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Are Customers Beating a Path to Your Store?

I recently read a book on the impact of blogging where the authors wrote about a CEO looking at the paths employees had worn in the grass on campus. The obvious point of the story is that people, despite the best intentions of planners, will find the shortest or most convenient path to their destination or goal and often don’t use the sidewalks.

As an online merchant, the goals of visitors to your site may be varied, but typically you are only worried about visitors with intent to buy. How do you know what paths visitors are taking to your store, and within your store? Let’s take a look at one way you can tell how visitors find your site.

Shoppers using search engines to find specific products can appear on your site on a section or product page if words on those pages match the words they entered when searching. Now, many visitors to your site may not be interested in buying, so optimizing your site for those visitors may get you more traffic, but not necessarily translate into more or larger orders. You can, however, discover how shoppers that actually purchased items from your site found your site by looking at the Referrer and Rev Share URL fields in the Order Manager

Often, you will see references to search engines in your Order Manager pages. For example, an order where the shopper found your store through a Yahoo! search may show:

Referrer: Yahoo search for keyword

where “keyword” represents the first search term entered by the buyer when searching. This information can also be viewed and downloaded from the References page under Statistics in the Store Manager. If you examine the Rev Share URL field, the full URL from the Referrer is shown. For example:

Rev Share URL: http://search.yahoo.com/search%3Fp%3Dipod%2Baccessories%26fr%3ieas-dns

From this you can see that this particular shopper found your site from a search on Yahoo! (the first part of the URL), and that they entered “ipod accessories as the search query (seen towards the end of the URL). The URLs for searches from other sites such as AOL, Google, and MSN will also show the keywords entered by the shopper.

You can then take these keywords and perform the same searches on sites that drive most of your traffic (check the References page to see which sites are driving your traffic). On the search results pages, you can see which pages from your site appear (and where they appear in the rankings) and then decide if you need to create a new section with content targeted to those keywords, or if you need to further optimize a specific product page for those keywords.

For the example above, the merchant would most likely want to create a section page (if one didn’t exist already) so shoppers looking for “iPod accessories” could view all accessories and not just one particular product. The best part of this approach is you are working backwards from the destination—an order you already received—rather than guessing how shoppers are finding your site. Be sure to keep in mind that changes you make to optimize for one set of keywords may impact your results for another set of keywords so try to find the common keywords found across multiple orders and optimize for those first. By working backwards from the destination and optimizing your pages for those searches, you are helping to create the shortest path for a shopper between the search box and your shopping cart.

In the next post we will take a look at one way you can tell what paths shoppers take within your site.

Stay tuned.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Welcome to the Yahoo! Store Blog

Welcome to the Yahoo! Store Blog.  We have started this blog as a way to share tips and tricks for using our tools and services. We want to help new online merchants get open for business and selling quicker, as well as help advanced merchants and developers accelerate their sales, work more efficiently, and use the product to its fullest potential. We plan to talk about new features and alert you to important upcoming changes.  Also, since your success is not all in how you use the product, we will share best practices to help improve your site’s usability, conversion of shoppers into buyers, and search engine optimization and marketing.

We plan to keep the posts informal and not an infomercial for all things Merchant Solutions—we don’t want to do all the talking. You can use the “feedback and suggestions” link (located in the column to the right) to send us an email. While we cannot respond individually to each email, do know that we are collecting and reading each one.  If you need support for a technical issue, please contact us by email or phone.

We plan to post regularly. We would love to read your comments in reply to specific posts. Please review the comment policy appearing in the column to the right.

Remember to check back often for more updates from the Merchant Solutions team.

Jimmy Duvall
Yahoo! Small Business