Woopra + Ecommerce = New Tricks

While I love, LOVE google. I now am starting to have warm and fuzzy feeling for woopra.com. Google analytics is good and it was the best, until woopra gave me more. Woopra provides real time site traffic information for who is on my sites, where they are doing and where they are going.

It appears that right now they are in beta mode, so they only let users have a limited number of domains to track. And the approval process can take a while. But once approved is has been an amazing tool for my clients.

We specialize in ecommerce solutions. With the downturn in the entire retail industry, the need to get more out of existing sites has increased. Clients are now willing to put the energy and time into fighting for every sale. Woopra gives some very valuable tools for doing this, but it does require some changes to your site to make the stats more meaningful.

This is only a summary. Please let us know where you want more details. We are happy to share. Comments are very welcome.

Change 1: Shopping Cart Info

In the past we have been very careful to provide each page on the site with a full page title. SEO companies have spent the last few years working the system to ensure that page titles have value. We a new twist on the page title puzzel. While we want search engines to find usable page titles, we need to give woopra more information so that traffic monitoring is more usable.

We decided to add some additional information to the page title: number of items in cart, subtotal. We realized that the search engines will almost never see this information, because they do not put items the shopping carts. But this information is very important was we watch traffic on the site.

With this information appended to the page title, woopra will show a site monitor the value of a given shopping cart as customers browse and add items to their cart.

Change 2: Category Page Titles

The second change was to add the parent category name for a given product or category. By adding this extra breadcrumb info, a site monitor will have an idea where the shopping may be in the hierarchy of a large site.

Additionally, we added the page number to the page title. This was valuable in letting us watch when a customers was browsing through product category that had more then one page of products. We started to look for trends or products that needed to be moved to the first page. Retailers are always happy when a product gets 'hot'. But often this can happen suddenly and for short periods. This makes it important for the e-commerce site to push the 'hot' product to the front.

Change 3: Referrer Channels

We have also found the referer and search engine key words reports are very useful. We started creating micro channels that customize each homepage and category to show selected products, depending upon where a potential customer originates. Meaning how did they find the site.

If the customer comes from a google search, we watch to see what products they end up looking for or purchasing. We then setup a channel that detects the search engine and uses the keywords to provide a preferred features product on the page page. Or even better a group of preferred products. The objective is to make the customers entry point in to the site more user friendly, with the hope that it will increase conversion rate.

Many of my clients are members of affiliate programs; Commission Junction and Link Share. Micro channels allow us to match the inbound link to a group of preferred products. For example, if the inbound link is from a blogger, we want the homepage to show the products this blogger has selected.

Change 4: International Orders

The final benefit and impact of adding woopra was information about customers' geographic location. Each time a customers visits the site, woopra shows a country flag. Many US retailers have ignored overseas markets because of credit card processing issues and shipping problems. But now that every sale is important and the US dollar is weak, overseas sales are important. Very important.

We added google checkout to many of your customer sites to enable them to capture these customers. Google provides the payment gateway and address verification. Additionally the google API lets the retailer determine country specific shipping rates.

Coming Soon...

We are now looking to find ways to report on and address shopping cart abandonment. Now that retailers are watching the individual shoppers as they browser their sites, they are unhappy when a cart has items, but the customers does not complete the sale.

So we are working on ways to minimize this...