Metrics Measurements, and Performance for E-Commerce

In this article I’d like to explain how you can create measurements for a website that is trying to sell a product that will provide insights into:

what your customers are doing
what convinces them to buy
what discourages purchase
why simple conversion rates are sufficient.
how you can implement simple tests to improve effectiveness at no cost.

Data and Answers

We need to begin by understanding that our analytics tools simply provide reports based on data. It won’t give us answers, or insights without us critically thinking about what is really being reported and tweaking our reports to give us the accurate information we need to base those decisions on.

If you don’t have an analytics tools installed yet on your website that’s the first step. If you have access to modify your site, it should be fairly easy to implement something like Google’s free analytics package (www.google.com/analytics), but there are other options out there as well.

Once you have the tool installed and working properly we can start looking at information it’s providing and giving it some meaning.

Terms:

URL: Uniform Resource Locator
This is the web address that the page is located at. It can be something as simple as www.mywebsite.com/index.htm or as complicated as http://subdomain.mywebsite.edu/category/default.asp?SectionID=6A50501913D44AF0A658C054A3A37AED

URL Parameters: everything after the “?” symbol in a URL

In the case of the previous example: http://subdomain.mywebsite.edu/category/default.asp?SectionID=6A50501913D44AF0A658C054A3A37AED

The part in bold is the URL Parameter. They can be used for more dynamic web interactions and tracking of information. This allows one “page” to be displayed in several different ways, all of which is controlled by the URL Parameter’s used.

to be continued…