It’s spring time, it’s clean time!

We had a good long look at our setting screen atMonitus.net the other day, trying to see it with the sweet, unpolluted and innocent eyes of a new merchant coming to our tools for the first time… That hurt! It appears we’ve been so busy building powerful, flexible tools that we forgot about making them accessible to everyone… Sorry. Truly. We have been whipping ourselves daily for a week after that. Once our backs healed a bit, and our brains stopped pouting form the abuse, we got to work, and came up with this new version for you guys – tadaaa! Come on, don’t be shy, have a look at the new setting screen…You’ll see it’s a little less intimidating.

Basically, we identified four areas or axes. We grouped our tools into these four areas, so it’s easier for you to focus your efforts into one of them at a time. Or even delegate (hmmm – delegation… We love delegation!) each area to different people on your team. The four axes are:

• Analyze: All things numbers: how well is your store doing, based on a bunch of metrics and reports.
• Test: Unless you are a marketing savant, testing is the best way to find what really works or not on your store, to improve conversion rate – use these tools to help you out.
• Process: Michael says it: it’s all about the process. Best way to keep sane in this biz, is to establish processes. These tools will help you focus your efforts where it counts.
• Engage: This set of tool allows you to further engage visitors – try to get them to come back, to convert, etc… It’s like having a visitor’s little angel in your pocket.

[April 18th, 11:00 AM PDT] Some users might have trouble accessing the Monitus Inspector in their Store Editor. One of our servers is currently undergoing maintenance and can not respond to the stores it normally hosts. Note that this does not affect the code that runs on these stores – your clients are not affected. We are terribly sorry about this, and will let you know as soon as the situation is back to normal. If you have any questions or ocmments, please contact us.

[April 18th, 1:00 PM PDT] Everything back to normal. Our sincere apologies for the trouble.

Do you really need another toolbar? Well, we believe so. If there is one thing that we believe in, it’s using data to make informed decisions. We use web analytics data to find out what works and what doesn’t on our sites and then take action. The trouble can sometimes be that we don’t have a clear process for optimization in the face of “too much data”.

With the Monitus Inspector we try to help with the process. The Monitus Inspector is a toolbar that pulls and displays data from your web analytics account right inside the Store Editor. You simply enable it in your Monitus Tools settings and it will then be visible when you work in the Store Editor.

Anyway, please see for yourself in this short 4 minute video:

This is a beta release, so we would welcome your feedback. Just a couple of notes. When you enable the Monitus Inspector it places a cookie on your browser, so if you delete cookies you’ll have to set it again. And Internet Explorer is not currently supported, so please use one of the other main browsers.

To get started, just login to your Monitus Tools account!