Posted by Scott Clark

If you’re a web merchant using the Yahoo Merchant Solutions e-commerce engine, your secret weapon for succeeding online has just been revealed.

The much anticipated roll-out of Yahoo! Web Analytics (formerly IndexTools) has started and I am thrilled. As I have been involved in Yahoo! Store development for a long time, specifically search marketing, the tool hits the sweet spot in my business.

I will be taking some time to become familiar so that I can bring Yahoo merchant solutions and Yahoo Store marketing solutions to the table bolstered by a robust analytics tool with built in tagging and an excellent dashboard.

The tool has a really nice path analysis tool that blows “click trails” out of the water and will help Yahoo Store merchants better organize their stores to meet the needs of real customers. No more guessing what order your menu should be in!

Yahoo! Web Analytics includes a complete dashboard for managing your business. What I most like is the idea of watching for and working on cart abandonment, something that has been hard to measure on Yahoo stores in the past.

…Yahoo! Web Analytics is designed to make it easy for you to answer your specific business questions. With features like drag & drop data filters, custom report wizards, and our segmentation selector, you can easily apply or remove filters to view the performance or characteristics of specific types of products, visitors and web pages….

Some of the reports

* Sales, revenue, average order value
* Conversion rate trends

* Visits, sales, revenue and conversion rates for specific keywords
* Sources of site visits, including organic search, referrals, paid search and direct access
* Product performance metrics, including the number of times each product has been viewed, added to the cart, and purchased
* Top internal site searches to inform merchants of consumer’s mindset during shopping.
* Checkout page analysis to show where customers abandon their shopping carts

I will keep you informed on this important advance.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Scott Clark is an independent consultant who started working in Internet Marketing in 1994 while in the Silicon Valley. Currently he works with organic and paid search optimization (SEO/SEM), social media marketing (SMM), local web marketing, split and multivariate testing of website offers, and integrated marketing activities. He has grown several successful web businesses on his own as well. Scott holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Southern Illinois University and is an accredited Google Adwords Professional, a Yahoo! Small Business Partner, a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador. He and his family live in beautiful Lexington, KY. Scott can be found online at http://www.sitecreations.com.