When we build an e-commerce site, our customers are really interested who is visiting and what they are doing. A free and really good option to get this kind of information is Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives you all the standard information like how many visitors per day, how many page views, the time spent, where visitors came from and which browser they used.
But there is more: using the e-commerce, you can get reports on the amount visitors spent on your site and which products they spent it on. Interesting information but you can probably also get this from your ERP system.
But what your ERP probably cannot do is apply the e-commerce data to other data in Analytics, giving you information such as which percentage of my revenue is caused by visitors using Internet Explorer version 7.0, or how much revenue is caused by visitors originating from the Google search engine. You can get all of this information by placing a small piece of java script on all your pages.
Also interesting is that Analytics allows you to segment your visitors on all kinds of data. By default you get segments like new visitors, returning visitors and traffic coming from search sites. But you can also create your own. This way you can create a segment representing all the visitors that bought a specific product.
But wait, there is even more: using simple java script, you can also track all kinds of events. For instance, you can track when people add something to their basket and which product this is, but you can also track downloads for files or any outbound links you might have. As you can see, the possibilities are almost endless.
But there is one thing Analytics doesn’t do and that is give you insight into what is happening on your site now. Google Analytics always has a log of several hours, which makes it impossible to see in real-time if your e-mail campaign is working.
I recently stumbled onto chartbeat, a web based service that does give you real-time insight into what is happening on your site. By placing a small piece of java script on your site, it does some things Analytics doesn’t do: it shows you how many people are on your site, which pages they are visiting, where they are coming from and what they are doing (reading, writing or idle) and more, all in real-time.
You can also set up e-mail and SMS alerts for such things as when the number of visitors to your site goes above the monthly average or the load time of a page is more than normal.
Chartbeat is not free (only for the first month) but US$ 10 per month is not too much for this kind of information.
Chartbeat and Google Analytics give you valuable insight into what is happening on your site.