The Monitus Reporter – Edition 3.0

Monitus Inspector acquires two new tools

STORE EDITOR — A press release from the desk of the Inspector today announced it has just acquired two new tools in it’s fight against poor store performance: the Product Affinity report, and the Anchor Money report. The Product Affinity report will allow the Inspector to report on a page’s top-10 selling products. “For section pages, this can be particularly interesting, as it can hint at the order your products should appear in on the page” says the Inspector, reached at his office in your store editor. Common wisdom dictates that content “above the fold” (the region at the top of a web page before a user has to scroll down) is prime real-estate. In their busy lives, customers just don’t have the time to scroll anymore. “By knowing which products sell best for a particular landing page, you can re-order your section items so that your best sellers come first in the list, hence above the fold, and sell even more!” The second tool the Inspector was proud to show us, is called “Anchor Money”. “The goal of this report is to show you, for any given page on your store, which keyword brought the most revenue to the page it points to. So for instance, if on your home page you have a link to your fruit-flavored Dustbusters, you could know, using the Anchor Money report, that your best keyword that bring people on your homepage, and then eventually make it to the fruit-flavored Dustbusters page is “banana dust bunnies” – so make sure your fruit-flavored page contains that key phrase, and try to improve this page’s ranking for this particular key phrase so that users, in the future, go directly to it, instead of landing on your homepage and having to look for what they want.” The Inspector also noted that you could use this knowledge to set-up AdWords campaigns, or use Monitus.net’s PersonaQuest tool to maybe offer a help pop-up to these users, short of directing them to the page directly – maybe even with a rebate offer. “These two new reports make me one of the most insightful Yahoo! Store Inspector out there – and I do it all for your readers, the Yahoo! Store Merchants. It’s all about helping out as much as I can.”

Coupon? What Coupon?

YOUR DATA — Monitus.net’s offering just got a little sweeter once again, with two simple features aiming to make coupon handling easier for merchants. In their Cart Recovery product, merchants can now see if a customer got a discount (used a coupon) when they converted. Another thing the folks at Monitus.net felt was missing, was in the checkout error message data sent to Google Analytics, (GA) when a customer uses an invalid coupon code. Previously, the event would only send the message the customer saw, to the effect that the entered coupon code was invalid. But the merchant would not know what code was in play. Now the GA event will also include the coupon code the customer used, so that they can hopefully spot people trying to use old codes and maybe bring back an obviously popular rebate they offered in the past.

PersonaQuest capitalizes on Google Analytics’ new non-interacting events

GOOGLE ANALYTICS — In previous versions of PersonaQuest, variations could be tracked through custom variables in Google Analytics. (GA) The major downside of variables is that you can only have 5, so they quickly come into conflict with one another. On the other hand, GA vents were not an option because sending an event on a landing page produces a second page view for the [age, drastically reducing your site’s bounce rate. Google heard it’s users pleas and added non-interacting events: events that, when triggered, do not count as a page view and, hence, do not count in your bounce rate calculations. The fine Monitus/net folks jumped on the bandwagon and changed the old PersonaQuest variables usage into non-interacting events, so they have the best of both worlds: no bounce-rate impact, and unlimited calls. GA reports all issued a sigh of relief and demonstrated an improved sense of self-worth.

“All States” defaces program’s user interface!

MONITUS — Data produced in response to an Access to Information request filed by the Monitus Reporter suggest the PersonaQuest user interface was defaced every time a user selected all states as the target of a Geographical rule. The rules list would overrun the browser’s screen, and spill-over on an unsightly second line. A source who wishes to remain anonymous, said it was shoddy work by the programmer. The Reporter requested an interview with Monitus.net’s programmer, but was told the programmer was crying of shame in his basement for a week or two. The ugly bug apparently had been fixed at the time of going to press.

I believe that every business needs great data, but they key is to actually use the data for conversion optimization.

We’ve spoken with lots of Yahoo! Store retailers and one theme comes up consistently. These retailers fully understand the value of data but might need some help finding the “right” data. They also understand the bottom-line impact of A/B testing but don’t have the time or expertise to handle testing in-house.

We recently started a pilot program with a few our customers. Using their actual web analytics data, we produce a comprehensive report that includes a targeted shortlist of low-hanging, high-impact conversion opportunities. This report costs $499 and comes with a one hour phone consultation where we discuss every aspect of our analysis. Retailers can then either use our recommendations themselves or continue working with us and let us handle the whole test planning and implementation.

If you’d like to get more info about this limited program, please let me know!

Michael

Turn your Store into a Lab

A little while back, we had a beautiful Google Website Optimizer (GWO) wizard all ready to launch. It was a work of art. An example of how tools can be made simple. A model of technological expertise. And then, Google killed-off the Google Website Optimizer API needed by our little gem of a tool. Well – no matter: there are many ways to skin a Google… Ladies and gents, we present to you today… (Drum roll, please) The new. The improve. The better. Google Website Optimizer Wizard 2!

This new version takes the form of a Chrome browser extension, and it basically simplifies (and we do mean simplify… a lot!) the set-up of a GWO experiment right there in GWO’s own interface. So all you need to do is install the extension in your Chrome browser, then scurry on over to GWO’s website, and start creating experiments – you’ll see the difference, promise!

Now, simplifying the interface is just one of the wonderful thing the extension can do for you. By having your GWO experiments managed by Monitus.net, you probably won’t have to publish your store anymore, to start or stop an experiment. Provided you test items that are already on your store, and that they are identifiable, (you should always, always, use “id” attributes in your HTML – but that’s another post) you can start, pause, stop experiments right there, live, without ever going back to the Store Editor!

But wait! That’s not all! If you keep on reading right now, we’ll throw in a few experiment templates to get you inspired and start testing stuff on your store! We’re that generous.

Website testing is of incredible value, but GWO’s interface was a bit frustrating to work with. And for a Yahoo! store, it was a bit of a pain to set things up on the store, republish, etc… No more, with our Wizard extension. So you have no more excuses: start testing stuff on that store!

And also, before we leave…

But you know us – we always love to show off, so we’re throwing in a few other things in this new version – admittedly not as big as the piece de resistance, but still… We have added a few changes to our other cool-tool PersonaQuest: (PQ)

• Keyword data: you can now insert the keyword that brought the visitor to your site (if any) into PQ HTML snippets… Sweet candy…
• Snippet insertion mode: in the good old days (like, yesterday) you could only replace the whole content of a targeted div with the PQ snippet. But now, you can either append the snippet to the existing div’s content, prepend the snippet, or replace it completely.
• Goal page: it is now possible to pick any page as the goal page for a PQ persona – you are no longer restricted to the confirmation page as the goal page.

Google Analytics (GA) announced it changed its definition of a visit (or session). This will necessarily have an impact on your metrics in GA, and at this moment in time, it is not clear if the changes observed are the result of a bug in the new implementation, or the new normal… We are following closely and will keep you posted as things develop.

UPDATE: (08/15/2011) A very good summary of the impacts can be found here on the L3 Analytics blog.
UPDATE: (08/18/2011) According to Google’s blog post, an issue was identified in the new visit count code and was fixed on Tuesday, August 16th… Initial reports seem to confirm this – hope you are seeing too!

It appears Google has introduced a bug in their latest javascript code… Because of our code, you and your customers will not see a javascript error. However, the code is not working in the background, which means your Google Analytics data is not being collected correctly at the moment.

We are monitoring the situation, but can’t do much to fix this, unfortunately. We will keep you updated as this unfolds…

Thank you!

Update: Google has acknowledged the issue and are working on a fix.

Update: Although Google has not acknowledged a fix yet, the issue seems to be fixed, once the new file is downloaded in the browser’s cache. We will let you know when Google officialy marks this issue as fixed.

Update: Google has officially marked this as fixed:We have confirmed that sites which use a third party javascript library, prototype.js, are affected. By our estimates, it appears to be less than 10% of Google Analytics users. Affected accounts will see a drop in traffic starting at 7am PST this morning (Thursday August 4th) with impact peaking at 9:30am PST. A fix has been deployed and collection will return to normal in approximately 2 hours.