Before You Market Your Site
Marketing an e-commerce site requires an all angles approach to bringing in traffic and converting traffic to sales. Marketing efforts must be balanced with site usability to ensure that traffic translates to sales conversions. There are a number of tools that can be used to provide statistical data monitor any marketing campaigns. These tools should be put in place prior to the launch of any marketing efforts to ensure an accurate ROI data. The difference between these solutions and the solutions of the past is that some of the newer solutions due more than telling you how many hits and page views your site has received. These solutions allow E-commmerce tracking by the use of Goal based funnel data to track each step throughout your site's checkout process. This allows you to see where customers are abandoning the checkout process. The funnel shows the most data at the widest position of the top of the funnel with a narrowing of the funnel with the least data at the bottom. Every shopping cart loses customer along the way to the receipt page. The goal is to minimize the number the fallout rate to maximize sales.
Options for Site Analytics
When you look at incorporating solutions to monitor site performance there a number of options to consider.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics formerly Urchin offers a free solution for garnering web statistics. This is a good solution considering the cost, but you will have 24 hours to see Sunday's data on Monday.
ClickTracks
ClickTracks offers a different approach to analyzing analytic data. ClickTracks uses a client/server approach which allows you to use a desktop based application instead of a web solution. The advantage here is that the desktop app allows you to easily segement your visitor traffic by any criteria you determine. For instance you can tag visitors that have entered the site via Google and searched by a certain keyword who only made it to the cart page but did not check out of the site. This is just one example of how the system can be configured.
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