After a decision is made to invest into an e-commerce website design and development, online retailers want to produce sales. When sales are not being generated and goals are not reached, the question is why and what can be done about it.
In many cases, the online retailer does not know enough about conversion optimization techniques or even how to run properly statistics and reports to determine what is actually happening to the website.
First, an online retailer must generate all required and necessary reports to get the facts on the e-commerce website design and sales conversions.
E-Commerce Website Reports, Statistics & Analytics
There are a multitude of different reports a company can utilize to analyze their website, traffic, and e-commerce store pages. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central are the two most critical reporting tools to identify the needed information of a website.
There are some key differences of both of these tools that need to be understood prior to the use of them. To make sure online retailers know these differences and what either tool is for, they are in more detail described below.
Using Google Analytics For Website Statistics & Reports
Google Analytics even though not the only reporting product out there is probably the most powerful, robust, and free software by Google. This reporting tool can be setup to monitor and keep track of just about any statistic and than some for online retailers. Once this software starts tracking a website, the online retailer can access a vast amount of reporting tools.
Since there are so many reports an online retailer can access though Google Analytics, below are the most important and key reports to generate.
Audience Reports are for Demographics, Interests, Behavior, Technology, Mobile, and Visitor Flow of a website.
Acquisition Reports are for Traffic, Referrals, Keywords, Social, and Search Engine Optimization of a website.
Conversions Reports are for website Goals and E-commerce milestones of a website.
Using Google Webmaster Central for Website Reports & Statistics
Google Webmaster Central reporting tools are critical to understanding how Google sees a website and the health status of a website. To improve a website, these reports are invaluable.
Another main key importance of these Webmaster Central reports are the Search Queries reports. They are important because they show how actually people are finding the website. What keywords the website is ranking for and in what position in search it appears.
Search Appearance Reports are for structural data, HTML improvements, and site links of a website.
Search Traffic Reports are for search queries, links to website, and internal links of a site.
Google Index Reports are for index status, content keywords, and needed removal of URLs of a website.
Crawl Reports are for crawl errors, crawl stats, blocked URLs, and sitemaps of a website.
Once an e-commerce website has undergone all the necessary reviewing of statistics, reports, and analysis, a much more concrete plan can be put into place to make necessary adjustments and edits to produce the desired results.
To generate sales through e-commerce websites, an operator must understand through these reports what is actually happening to the website. Calculate conversion and also most importantly understand the quality of traffic to the website, which these reports will help identify.
