Top 10 Reasons Why Customers Abandon Their Shopping Carts
May 13, 2008
I wrote a brief article about Multi-page checkouts versus Single or “One Page” checkouts the other day and I wanted to follow-up with some reasons that people such as the customers and potential customers on your websites right now abandon their shopping carts. It is probably the biggest problem faced by anyone running an e-commerce based company today. So what factors affect people from spending on your web site? Well…
- Cost of shipping too high and not shown until checkout
- Changed mind and discarded cart contents
- Comparison shopping or browsing
- Total cost of items is too high
- Saving items for later purchase
- Checkout process is too long
- Out of stock products at checkout time
- Checkout requires too much personal information
- Poor site navigation and long download times
- Lack of sufficient product or contact information
Source: SurveyPro
As you can see “Time is Money” as I stated in my original article and overall success in e-commerce weighs heavily on the cost of purchasing and the time in which is takes to do it. Just something to think about if you run an ecommerce business
Luc
Setting up Benchmarking in Google Analytics
April 13, 2008
I recently got an email from the fine folks at Google about some of the functionality that they are releasing into Google Analytics for Beta testing. One of these was the option to use benchmarking in your Google Analytics and I can think of a few reasons why Benchmarking is important especially as you further develop your web presence.
The biggest reason is “How does my online business compare to the competition?” and benchmarking provides you a way to see how you stack up to the industry standard because it is hard plan where you want to grow your business when you cannot track the health of your business. So how do you set this up?
- Login to your Google Analytics Account
- Click on the Website Profile you want to add benchmarking to
- Click on the “Visitors” category in your dashboard
- Beneath that select “Benchmarking (beta)” option
- Lastly, click “Accept” and activate this feature
If you want to see more Google says that it may take some time to see the benchmarking data come through. That then you can compare your website, web portal, e-commerce store, etc to industry verticals when analyzing your web presence.
Luc
Google Analytics vs. Microsoft adCenter Analytics - Round 1 - Usability
April 8, 2008
The amount of forensics you can do on your data
Being able to understand the “why” and “how” of observing patterns in data is key to success to performing solid website analysis. I noticed that Google Analytics did a good job when it came to giving me the name of the source, durations and narrowing it down. However Microsoft was limited (even though it’s a Beta version) at best and you really have to dig to find the information you want. Have a look…
I find a lot lacking in the Beta release from Microsoft because Google Analytics is at a point where it is very user-friendly so in my opinion from a usability standpoint Microsoft could learn a ton from Google Analytics in terms of application functionality.
The graphs are too small; the views that are offered lack the thought of the people that will be using it. It wasn’t designed with people in mind. Most times people want more options of analysing and sorting data then just “view contents of the group” or “view segmentation by item = Age, Gender, Occupation or Geographic Location”. In terms of segmenting data for marketing efforts I feel that this is the bare minimum which Google Analytics offers more then vast amounts of information.
Because the term “Web Analytics” is turning into a big keyword for the next version of the web, an internet based on intelligence, intelligent web applications and the people who use them in everyday life, naturally many people believe that you just need to pick a tool, install and configure it and start tracking traffic but if Web Analytics is used wisely it runs deeper then the tools you use and it is a practice of applying tools and knowledge and business smarts to develop your business online.
Luc
Growing Traffic from Google by 493% per month!
April 1, 2008
The name of the game in website development is growth. The growth of web-based business systems, growth of revenue and of course growth of visitors and traffic are all important to website development in terms of running a profitable online business. I used Google Analytics recently to track the success of people finding my website using Google searches and noticed a growth pattern…
- Month 1 – 6 Google-related hits
- Month 2 – 28 Google-related hits
- Month 3 – 222 Google-related hits
- Month 4 – 471 Google-related hits
- Rate of Change between Month 1 and Month 2 = + 476%
Using Long Tail Analysis in Keyword Development
March 20, 2008
Exploding sales figures of online business (or any business for that matter) takes in depth analysis. When it comes to looking at the keyword that people use to find your website or a web page on your website you must first understand or develop an understanding of how people find the pages on your website. If you are looking to improve search engine traffic then this means focusing on those little keywords that make up the 1 or 2 hits to your website and optimizing the site and pages within the website based from there because they equal 80 to 90 percent of the results.
Keywords with 3 visits and above = 17 hits or 2.9%
Keywords under 3 visits = 629 hits or 97.1%
Total keywords = 646 keywords
