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Beanbasket News 877-324-2326 March 2008 In this issue... » Beanbasket News » Search Engine Optimization Tips » E-Commerce News » Tip of the Month » Website of the Month Beanbasket News Web Analytics Can Help Improve Your Online Store The road to profitability is through web analytics. Tools that allow merchants web details have become much easier to use and increasingly popular.  Web analytics analyzes a multitude of different types of data.  This is data you already have and by further analyzing it, you will see the rewards it produces. Beanbasket offers web statistics, a basic version of analytics, through their dashboard.  To further drill into your site, Beanbasket integrates Google Analytics and Mercent Analytics to track consumer behavior.  All you have to do is setup an analytics account then login into your Beanbasket account and follow the setup instructions and code is automatically added to your website.  Beanbasket is preintegrated with Google Analytics and Mercent Analytics, however, you can use other web analytic companies like Omniture, but you would need to manually paste the tracking string onto each page of your site. Merchants have been drilling into their client activity using web analytics to maximize profit.  Some of the most important benefits include the following:   1)      Maximizing your return on investment through marketing and targeting a consumer base.  You can track multiple marketing campaigns, such as search engines or e-mail campaigns, that are the most effective in driving up sales and make decisions about whether to keep or discontinue using these strategies. 2)      Analytic tools allow you better monitoring your visitors and users.  Analytics allows you to track where your customers came from, the length of time they visited your site, how many times they have visited your store, which pages they looked at, and what keywords they used to search on your site. 3)      Optimize your site for search engine ranking.  You can use analytic data to ensure links are fully functioning and that meta descriptions and meta keywords are correctly used.  For example, when copying content to your site, sometimes the links do not follow through correctly to the new pages.  Data from analytics will find those broken links for you so that you can link them to your new content and restore functionality. The data is available for you to view, so make sure you take advantage of this to fully maximize your conversion rates and site optimization opportunities. New Beanbasket Features Watch your Inbox!! There will be a new Beanbasket release with a lot of new, important features coming shortly. In the next newsletter we will go into greater detail and expand upon these robust new features.   E-Commerce News Behavioral Analytics: The Why and How of E-Shopping By Mark Nagaitis E-Commerce Times Think of this scene: A woman walks into a high-end department store on Fifth Avenue. As she enters, a salesperson rushes up to her, shouting: "Welcome back, Ms. Smith. Last time you were here, you bought some makeup. I bet you want to buy some perfume today, right?" Web-based commerce has made massive strides in the past 10 years. The leaders in the space are using manifold technologies in an effort to attract qualified customers -- and to keep them returning. However, simple examples like the one above in which e-commerce Get your ecommerce site to the top of all major search engines with Aplus.Net. best practices are compared with those employed in traditional stores lead some behavioral experts to wonder if something is missing. Today's Analytics - the Who and the What Over the last few years, there has been a significant shift in the focus of e-marketers. Initially, the promise of e-commerce was the sheer accessibility and volume potential of the Web site. The problem was marketing E-Mail Marketing Software - Free Trial. Click Here. the Web site and driving customer traffic to the site. More recently, the focus of e-marketers has been how to close and retain customers, driving them directly back to their site based on their previous positive experiences at that store. In non-cyberspace terms, it's why we drive past the local supermarket to go to our preferred place to buy groceries. As e-commerce technologies have evolved over the past decade, the understanding of the customer's behavior both online and offline has increased significantly. By integrating Web-tracking tools with other marketing systems, we determine the customer's demographic with relative ease. Understanding gender, location, income and other demographic factors provides important information on that customer's potential buying patterns. Similarly, past behavior on the Web site, including purchase history, browsing behaviors and other sites visited add to that important information. Traditional Web analytics products provide an important view of Web site statistics. Many of these tools provide volumes (and volumes!) of information for the statistically biased e-marketer to consume, analyze and reanalyze. If visitors from the East Coast of the U.S. using Internet Explorer 6.0 are abandoning on the checkout page, your favorite analytics tool will point it out. Extremely sophisticated product relevance solutions can determine what the customer might buy. Systems that analyze past purchase patterns can recommend related products (see the example above). Advertising placement solutions ensure that snowplows are not presented as "this week's special offer" to a Houston resident in November. Other solutions use "crowd behavior" as an indication of where the individual will click next. The result of these very complex and sophisticated solutions is a detailed understanding of who the customer is and what they might want to buy. Mr. Jones Goes Selling Mr. Jones is a seasoned -- let's call him veteran -- salesperson. He's been doing it for 30 years and loves his job. He is the guy you meet that describes himself as a people person. Plus, he is very, very successful. He describes the selling process as a relationship. When he talks about his customers, he refers to them by their first name, describes the transaction as a journey and talks about their motivations and goals. His customers keep buying from him. New behavioral analytics products are emerging that attempt to derive a new understanding of e-commerce customers beyond the demographic and historical tracking described above. These products are mapping Web-based actions -- keyword searches, navigation paths, click-patterns -- to traditional human communication Improve customer service and productivity with Avaya Unified Communications. patterns. Behavioral scientists and psychologists are using this input and applying compute power such as fast artificial neural networks to understand the more human factors of the customer's behavior as they go through the buying process. For further reading of this article go to: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/62061.html Website of the Month   "One of my most used features in the Beanbasket shopping cart is multi-tier pricing. Beanbasket made it possible for me to offer pricing that my customers were bargaining for - a win-win for both buyer and seller! Beanbasket is more than a shopping cart. They truly care about my business - making suggestions and giving advice.  We are growing together tackling challenges with minimal limitations. “No” is not in their vocabulary. What may not be available now WILL be available in the future. Beanbasket, my most appreciated monthly expense I have!" -Therese Price aka RagLady Chesapeake Wiper & Supply, Inc.   SEO Tips of the Month     1.)  Remember that optimization principles also apply to your press releases or media releases. Next time you put out a press release, use Wordtracker to see if you can build in a couple very busy high performance phrases related to real world news. These can sometimes be spotted in Wordtracker's Top 1000 (Short Term Report.)  2.)  One quick and easy way to see how you are using your keyword phrase "visually" at a glance, is to enter your main keyword phrase into Google's tool bar and turn on the "hilighter" option. This highlights every instance of your phrase as it is being used on the page. You can glance at it briefly and visually spot where ever you may be over-using any keyword. Tips from: Emily Leach Search Engine Academy Southwest   Beanbasket Tips of the Month The Cost of Copying Directly From Microsoft Word Search engine optimization and ranking is obviously a vital source of website activity for most companies. Simple character mismatches can seriously impact search rankings in a negative way.  The most common cause of problems like this is copying text directly from MS Word. And typically it is something as simple as an apostrophe that causes the problem.  When copying from MS Word, the characters are not the same as straight text-only characters that HTML requires, causing the search engine to not recognize the character and potentially the word or phrase. So as a simple, yet important reminder, copy and pasting from MS Word into a Web page document is ALWAYS a bad idea! A simple way to avoid these problems is to copy from MS Word to Notepad and then paste into your web page.   Internet Retailer 2008 Conference & Exhibition, is America’s largest e-retailing conference. The IRCE 2008 Show, which will be held at the new McCormick Place West in Chicago on June 9-12, is the premier event in e-retailing, which this year features 125 expert speakers representing all types of merchants (store chains, catalogers, web-only retailers and branded manufacturers) and addressing all vital issues affecting online retailers today. In addition to its highly rated conference agenda, Internet Retailer 2008 Conference & Exhibition also features the largest display of e-retailing solutions in its 130,000-square-foot Exhibit Hall.