Starting Your Own Yahoo Store by Brenda Michell - HTML preview

6

THE IMPORTANCE OF ANALYSIS

When it comes to building a successful business online, you need to know what is happening within that business at any time. Yahoo! Store provides you with what they call in depth analysis. As your business is running, you will want to know things such as who is visiting and what they are looking at. This service is available, but you have to know how to use it.

With it, you can:

• • Track the sales that you get from your site. This includes seeing where your revenue is coming from, the number of items you are selling and the number of orders you are taking. This is helpful to pinpoint trends.
  • You can use it to identify how the traffic is coming in to your site. You do this through what is called referrers. This includes affiliates who may be helping you to gain business to your site.
  • Page views is also important. Here, you will learn how many people visited the page so that you can see which pages are doing the best for you.

This is basic information, but it is information that you need to have in order to do well on the web. You can then tailor your marketing around the trends you find.

YAHOO! WEB ANALYTICS

If you do decide to go with the standard or the professional plan, Yahoo! Store will provide you with Yahoo! Web Analytics. This is a much more detailed tool for you to use in tracking the success of your business. With this tool, you will simply be able to page through results pages that tell you what is happening with your site, including the following information:

• • You are able to see real time reports, as they happen, and key performance information that will tell you what is happening with your site at any time.
  • Use it to help determine what your top sellers are and how often the products on your site are being viewed.
  • Make changes to your site so that you can get more shoppers to buy from you. You can do this by learn how and why customers do not complete their order and to determine what pages make shoppers leave.
  • You can also learn how visitors who get to your site are using it. This way, you can tailor the design and appeal of the site to better serve their needs. For example, you can track page views, first time visitors, return visitors, find out how they found your website, what they did when they arrived at your site and so on.

As you can see, these tools are highly effective in providing you with information in regards to how well your site is doing. However, you have to take the time to use them in order for them to work. The good news is that most of these tools are very simplistic to use.

By tracking this information, you can go back into your wizard for setting up your site and make changes to it that you see fit. For example, you might notice that customers are visiting one page and leaving the site from there frequently. You can improve that page to make it more alluring or you may want to change the web pages that point to that page.

It is recommended that you do wait a few weeks after getting your site up to start using these tools so that you can see a clear description of what is happening with the site. Nevertheless, use them. They are going to give you incredibly important information that you will benefit from.