Forum Moderators: DixonJones
1. Is my site growing in popularity.
I would suggest looking at uniques in concert with visits to see whether traffic to the site is increasing.
2. Where are my buyers really coming from? (I get referral info but how do I know who purchased?)
For this scenario I usually use sessions to store referer information(when avialable) and then when they purchase/sign up I submit the session info along with their order.
3. Are parts of my site working poorly?
4. Which parts of my site are doing the best?
Hm, I'm not really sure how to answer this. You could analyze the way people travel through the site. Top exit pages might be the most relevant. This could tell you where you most often lose people. Clickpaths and time spent on various pages may give you the information you want.
The key for any stats package is to look at all oof the information it offers (which is often overwhelming) and then try to understand what it means. A lot of the info is not very useful as a stand alone statistic. The majority of the information needs to be looked at from a higher level to obtain th true value.
The various sections of the site need to be looked at differently as well. Take a look at the number of people that are abandoning carts without purchasing. Look at how many people come and never purchase or signup. Look at where you lost those people.
You also need to familiarize yourself with the raw server logs, not just the stats package's interpretation of them.
The true data is in raw logs but it has waaay too much information. When you are really trying to drill down into the information though it is the absolute best way to do it.
I agree with what jatar_k wrote about popularity and where buyers come from.
Here are some other thoughts, to prequalify them I am relatively experienced in business and sales and marketing and with general website promotion but not with ecommerce. If there are others who can help you with deep experience of running ecommerce sites you may get better value advice from them.
1. Is my site growing in popularity.
IMO Popularity could be thought of in a number of ways.
Note: I think its always wise to get and keep raw access logs in such a way that you can ask questions of them as you decide what questions are of value. Questions will come to you over time and having the ability to go back to query the data is essential if you are to find out anything of value.
However when you know what raw data is being collected in total, then forget the detail every now and again and ask yousrself just logically - what do I want to find out?
Popularity .. what does it mean to you?
How many unique visitors come to your site daily, weekly, monthly?
How many pages does your site serve daily, weekly, monthly?
How many other websites link to your site?
How many visitors are sent in from static inward links?
How many unique visitors do you get from search engines, over time?
How many pages does each type of visitor typically visit?
How long do they spend on each page, in each section?
How many people revisit your site?
How frequently do they come back?
Over what time period do you retain this repeat users return pattern (when do they stop coming back)?
Do you get subscriptions to anything (even a free notification service or newsletter)
I expect I could go on for a while, some questions can not be answered by simple access logs on a standard html site, for example you will need to apply some login or cookies or some other unique user identifier which lasts between sessions in order to identify patterns pertaining to repeat users.
2. Where are my buyers really coming from? (I get referral info but how do I know who purchased?)
First find a way to identify the subset of buyers from total site visitors.
Buyers must have left more of a trace with you and your company than just the entries in your logs with IP addresses that simple visitors leave. At least there must be emails or form transactions or I would expect a great deal more detail than that left as clues to buyers identities.
So taking the example of a form transaction which can be linked to buyers, make sure your form captures IP address and date and time when the form is used. Compare these with your logs and pages viewed. You can link records in your logs to form users who bought to track buyers back into your logs and thence to their referral info.
Note: increasing broadband usage and use of static user IP addresses should make user tracking somewhat easier in the case of single users per broadband connection, perhaps this will only apply however for domestic household type users.
Anyhow continuing with the form example, using the IP and date time you can isolate *buyers* log entries from the total set, find their inital referrer details, any search engine sites and associated key words.
These may well show you "phrases that pay" for your site or at least ones that historically have paid for you.
3. Are parts of my site working poorly?
How long do people spend there, where do they come to there from, where do they go from there to?
Is this what you expected?
Any large file downloads (large pdfs perhaps) check file size delivered against actual filesize for problems or broken off downloads. lots more .. think laterally .. what did you build that bit for, are people using it that way, read Bretts guide to a successful site in google in 12 months for loads of tips that work for this question.
4. Which parts of my site are doing the best?
Depends on what you consider as good?
Is it doing what you expect?
Are you getting good ranges of referrals for a range of keywords you wanted?
If you are selling products are the ones moving the ones you expected to move?
Are they products on which you make acceptable profits?
Do they correlate with where you get good SE rankings?
All normal business questions apply from the offline world as well btw :-)
Are there cross selling opportunities you may be missing?
There is no way really to discuss or make suggestions on this last question without knowing a lot more about your site, business, sector, competition etc.
Anyhow I hope those few ideas help you get going.
