Retail eCommerce Websites: How do I track performance?
What is the best way of tracking performance and what are the main things to look for?
Google Analytics is very good and is free. They have produced it primarily so that those people who use AdWords (the service where you pay Google for every click), to monitor and improve their results. It is in Google’s own interest to do this because if they can help their customers get better results from Google advertising, their customers are more likely to spend more money on it. However Analytics can be used by anyone it just needs some code added into the website.
The things to measure would be Visitors and where they come from. Are they coming from search engines, other websites or any advertising you are doing? Next is how many of these visitors bounce straight off the website again. This is called Bounce Rate. If your bounce rate is over 40% you should look into why. Then look at how much time they spent on the site. Is there a trend of them spending longer or shorter time. This can indicate potential problems. Finally see what percentage went on to buy something and see whether there is a trend going up or down. Don’t measure hits. Hits is misleading as lots of automated robots and things create hits, so they don’t equate to visitors.