A high proportion of ecommerce site owners are not fully aware of the importance of the data provided by the site statistics and reports. Do not let the pie and bar charts fool you into thinking these are just a collection of useless numbers that you do not have the time to digest. There is a lot of useful information in these pages that can help you improve the income of your site and you do not have to be a career mathematician to make sense of them.

The reports fall into broad categories that also help you identify what information they contain and how they can assist; Pages viewed, Visitors, Keywords, Systems and Basket abandonment.

Pages viewed

This data will give you the most popular parts of the site, the most frequent sequence of pages viewed by visitors, the benefits of this are fairly obvious, take a look at the pages and see why they have this attraction and see if this can be replicated in other parts of your site. But as well as this take some time investigating the least viewed pages as well: why are visitors not using them? Are they just supporting information and about us pages, which is not a problem, but if they contain items you want to market and sell, you need to find out why they are not doing the job.

Visitors

A lot of answers to your target market are in these stats. Who is visiting? How long are they spending on the site? How often do they come back? - you can use this information to tune your marketing and better understand your audience, you can also create a benchmark to see whether the changes you make are having a positive effect on your visitor numbers.

Keywords

The stats will also identify the words and phrases used in the search engine that brought the visitor to your site. Are they what you expect? Or are the words used by visitors in some way different? This intelligence should be fed back into the site by using your customer keywords, where appropriate, plus any Google Adword (Pay Per Click) campaigns you may be using.

Systems

The operating systems used by visitors is also a useful benchmark of the lifestyles of your target market, are many using mobiles to access your site, is this what you would expect, does your site handle mobile, right through to checkout? If not, it is certainly time to review your site as there is a increasing move across to mobile access to the Internet by consumers.

Basket abandonment

Do not let the premature exit by visitors before they have made a purchase spoil your day. In a number of cases they will have gone as far as leaving email addresses, which provides you with the ability to contact them. In fact most good ecommerce systems have this facility built in to automatically wait for a pre-set time and fire off an email with an encouraging message to come back and complete the purchase - having saved the contents of the shopping basket for them. In most cases the reasons for abandoning the basket are benign, for example; they were midway through the order and the broadband link went off...by the time they got the service re-activated many people have other things to do and do not revisit the site. For this and other reasons they would welcome a friendly email supplying all the information they need to pick up and complete the transaction. Unless you follow up these abandoned links you will never know, in our clients experience 10% or more of visitors emailed in this way came back and made the purchase.