Where to find e-commerce shopping cart providers with web analytics, Facebook, and bank integration
Thinking of online retail? Use this Free eCommerce Shopping Cart Comparison to see what integrates with an analytics solution and payment gateway easily
Thinking of an eCommerce business? Select a cart that makes digital analytic measurement easy to plan first!
I’ve made this chart of eCommerce shopping cart solutions available. Each offer different capability to integrate an analytics solution. Although some coding effort is needed in general, some solutions provide a plug-and-play capability. The chart includes a consideration of which kinds of banking/payment options are available, whether the sites include Facebook commerce option, and if analytics integration is available. Having these features in place makes sales easy to manage, and to permit an analytics tools to reveal when customers are dropping out of a cart…and not purchasing your product.
Click here for the full e-commerce shopping cart chart in pdf format.
Free Google Analytics webinar – How to manage your business online through web analytics
This September 2011 webinar I created for Small Biz Technology shows how Google Analytics (and any web analytics, for that matter) should work in your business. You can make choices that help you manage the business effectively. Ramon Ray, editor of Small Biz Technology, made the introduction.
This video will show the importance of setting a goal, how to use paid search, and how referral traffic should be monitored. This can aid your business’ effort to make timely decisions based on the data presented.
Note: Due to processing, the audio was somewhat damaged.
When Custom Variables Are Consistently Useful: Customer segmentation by membership
Ah, the New York Times. A paper with global stature. No paper made more significant headlines of its own in the online world when the New York Times announced its digital subscription program (details here). The skinny is that visitors who are not subscribers can view up to 20 post in a month, while subscribers of one of three digital news packages have unlimited access. When non-subscribers click on their 21st article, they can purchase a subscription. The plan was implement in March 2011, and the jury is still out on how well the paywall plan is working. New York Times is noted to be the largest newspaper publisher who has implementing a paywall.
Many online blogs operate like a newspaper, and while many still are not at the scope of New York Times, a financial model for making a profit can be a challenge. So what would a small business do to emulate a paywall, or even figure how to better serve its audience? One analytics feature that would be helpful is developing a custom variable to distinguish subscribers online.
A few words on custom variables. Custom variables are a javascript call out that measure page actions for specific activity, In the case of visitor, measurement can include such as the number of pageviews from members who log in on a members-only site. The variable is typically activated by modifying the analytics code, inserting the following Javascript call out with parameters.
Google Analytics requires that index, name, and value are identified. They are determined as followed method accepts four parameters:
- index—This is a slot number, with a single value from 1 – 5, inclusive. This is meant as a key for one custom variable, so you can have index 1, and index 2, an index 3, and so on.
- name— This is a string that identifies the custom variable.
- value—This ia a value that is paired with a name. You can pair a number of values with a custom variable name, such as a custom variable name gender and supply male and female as two possible values.
- opt_scope—The scope for the custom variable, usually for an additiona description
Most web analytics solutions have some variation of the callout. Piwik, for example, uses the Javascript callout setCustomVariable( index, name, value, scope ) where scope is named “visit” or “pages” depending on whether your variable is tracking based on visits or pages.
When you decide to implement custom variables, you need to consider your site needs carefully against your budget, since most paid solutions offer more flexibility with variables. Piwik and Google Analytics, both free solutions, limit the number of custom variables, while paid solutions Yahoo Web Analytics and Omniture Site Catalyst permit more variables and offering even more customization.
But custom variables can help track visitors to distinguish traffic patterns between members and non-members. Such an arrangement would help your blog develop what effort would convert non-subscribers to subscribers, as well as may other ideas to maintain traffic onsite and provide unique, nuanced treatment for two separate sets of visitors.
There are plenty of other ways a custom variable can be used. Justin Cutroni offers a unique way of using custom variables for coupons – you can read about his process here.
What other ways can custom variables be useful?
(Update) Google Plus for Business has arrived – Is Google Analytics integration being planned?
The stats for Google Plus + were initially impressive, kicking off a number of Facebook vs. Google + posts on the web. As of end of July 2011 comScore reported 20 million unique visits to the network and averaging nearly 2 million visits a week according to Experian (source: Mashable). Users also liked groups called circles to manage separate newsfeeds, keeping messages organized.
Google Plus
Google initially cautioned business owners to not create a Google Plus profile, but has since released a Plus for business page. Setting are similar in arrangement to that on Facebook; Business plus owners must have a personal plus page before setting up a business page.
No details have been released if there’s an integration to Google Analytics but the potential incorporation of analytic capability link would be an important development for Google. Google has revamped its Google Analytics solution to include a social media plug in. Furthermore Google +1 buttons can be tracked in Google Analytics, so a refined integration with Google Plus would make further sense – imagine being able to see what traffic from shared networks is effectively coming to your site.
An analytics integration would provide more segmentation opportunities for participating businesses and lead to better identification of how traffic is being lead to a sign up, a purchase, or another designated conversion. Conversion measurement is sorely lacking in Facebook – a marketer can measure likes, comments and sharing a site, but no funnel analysis capability exists in Facebook Insights to guide a business to select a media based on conversion goals.
Linking Google Plus to Google Analytics would continue Google’s refresh effort for the analytics solution. It will also offer new ideas for small businesses beyond the current assumptions of how analytics can be used.
Google Analytics v5 will provide enhanced marketing and business intelligence to small businesses
(Note: this is a recap from 2011. Google is currently supporting this version as of September 12, 2012)
On March 17th Google announced a new version of Google Analytics (You can read the Google Analytics blog announcement here ). Version 5, previewed at the annual Google Analytic User Conference in San Francisco as well as at the Google Analytics blog, introduces significant improvements. It may have been the cause of earlier rumors of Google rolling out a paid analytic solution to compete with Webtrends and Omniture Site Catalyst (Note: Google released Google Analytics Premium since this post). But GA is ubiquitous, with numerous social media, email, and marketing measurement tools that enhance its features, so in my opinion, a new product change of that magnitude would have required a number of steps on Googles part coupled with negating some of Google’s claims about the current benefits of GA. But I digress. 
I looked at a related post from Justin Cutroni, Director at Webshare (which had an announcement itself — merging with VKI Studios to form Cardinal Path). Justin is author of Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior (You can see a review of Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior at Small Business Trends) and Performance Marketing with Google Analytics (with Caleb Whitmore and Sebastian Tonkin). He gave a brief walk through of version five that captures the key differences, which you can see in the above video.
The user interface receives the most notable share of revisions, in an attempt to increase usability and report accessibility. Google revised the flexibility of creating a unique dashboard, as well as the navigation bar. It’s now a two-tier bar, placing reports selections above the graph. Metrics are also above the graph, so there’s less of a need to scroll down unless a deep dive is necessary (which makes sense). The kinds of available reports has been revised, with some eliminated based on user input. The dashboard is more closer to a wiki, with better flexibility for metrics shown and how there are displayed — a gauge is available, as well as pie charts and tabular graphs. Multiple dashboards can be created. Naming conventions are changes in some cases, such as Sources becoming Incoming sources.
A termcloud feature displays the traffic and page data, so search terms are displayed in a manner similar to a word cloud. Like Justin, I am excited about this feature because it should give casual users a new way to visualize what is working for their site. Blogger should benefit to figure out what words brought visitors to the site.
In the meantime, expect a follow up from me on the features and what I personally like about it soon, as the new version is rolled out.