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