Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon is one of the industry leaders in keyword ranking software and one of the most established. The software itself is abundant with features allowing you to track and monitor large amounts of keywords. Working in the world of SEO, AWR is an essential tool that has the capability to manage hundreds of projects with ease and reliability.
Google Checkout is a service provided by Google for processing online payments. Merchants can integrate Google Checkout with their website to provide customers with a simple, secure and fast way to pay for online purchases. Customers only need to register once with Google, and then future transactions on participating websites only require the buyer to login to use the Google Checkout payment system. Not having to enter all your details every time you wish to buy something online is a definite bonus and should result in making the purchasing process much quicker and more convenient. Google Checkout also has an added bonus of allowing buyers to track all their online transactions from different websites in one place. With a high potential to increase checkout conversion rates and its integrated online fraud protection for both the buyer and seller, it’s not hard to see why Google Checkout continues to grow in popularity.
The e-commerce section of Google Analytics offers the following information from its reports:
Overview: It is what it says it is, an overview of your site’s e-commerce activity. Revenue is the value of purchases. Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that resulted in a purchase. Transactions shows the number of purchases and the Average Order Value is the average revenue generated from each of these purchases. Purchased Products represents how many different products (SKUs) were sold.
Implementing e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics allows you to collect data from a shopping cart on your domain, or from another 3rd party domain by adding some extra code. If the store for your website is on a different domain or sub-domain, then the following information should help you to configure your site for 3rd party shopping cart tracking. Dependent upon whether or not the shopping cart is part of your domain, different methods for tracking these shopping carts apply.
Tracking e-commerce transactions in Google Analytics is a really useful thing to do. There are two main steps involved with implementing e-commerce tracking. The first involves enabling e-commerce reporting in the settings for your website profile. You can achieve this by going to the ‘Analytics Settings’ page in your account and clicking on ‘edit’ for the website profile you wish to activate e-commerce tracking for. The page that loads should be the ‘Profile Settings’ page for this profile and from here you need to click on ‘edit’ in the top right-hand corner of the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ section. The next page lets you edit the profile information and all you need to do is change the radio button from no to yes under ‘E-commerce Website’.
Usually the Google Analytics tracking code is inserted into the bottom of your website content, right before the </body> tag of each page you are planning to track. This is the recommended installation, as it helps to avoid page loading issues/delays. Sometimes however it is necessary to implement the code elsewhere on a page, for instance if frames are used, the Google Analytics ‘link’ or ‘linkByPost’ methods are called, or if custom JavaScript functions that may conflict with the ga.js file are being utilised.
The basic implementation of Google Analytics is a relatively straight forward process. Tracking is achieved by adding a snippet of JavaScript code to all the pages on the website that you wish to record statistics for. The tracking code is supplied during the Analytics account setup process, but it can also be found in the settings for the site’s profile within the main account. To find the code, sign into your account, go to the ‘Analytics Settings’ page and select ‘Edit’ on the profile for which you require the JavaScript code. Clicking on ‘Check Status’ in the top right hand corner of the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ box will bring up the tracking code.
Setting up a Google Analytics account is a relatively straight forward process. The first thing you need is a Google Account. This is a user account that provides you with access to Google products and services. If you don’t already have one, signing up is easy. There are several places on Google’s websites that lead to the sign-up process, but the best place is at https://www.google.com/accounts/ where you can click on ‘Create an account now’ to begin the registration process. You will be asked for an existing e-mail address and to specify a password for the Google account. After that, choose your location, complete the word verification field and read/agree to the terms and conditions before clicking on ‘I accept. Create my account’. Once this form has been filled in Google will send you a confirmation e-mail in order to help prevent spammers and let you verify the creation of the account. After this validation process you’re good to go regarding your Google Account and are ready to proceed with signing up for Google Analytics.
The average professional analytics package tends to be both powerful and highly flexible. It is possible to implement analytics on a website in such a way that it can track every aspect, detail, goal, etc … Unfortunately though, in order to go into this depth of tracking you need to be educated in the field of web analytics and the package in question. Failing that of course, you either need to know or find someone who is clued-up on the relevant subject matter, which has the potential to work out quite expensive when you want a more detailed analytics configuration.
Page Views and Unique Page Views sound like they are essentially the same metric, but they’re not. Although similar in name, the difference between them occurs due to the fact that they are calculated in different ways.
A page view is counted each time a page on the website being tracked is loaded or ‘viewed’. With Google Analytics a page view can be counted when any web page with the correct tracking code is loaded, or if the ‘urchinTracker’ event code executes. An ‘urchinTracker’ event can be implemented in order to simulate a page view to be included within Google Analytics reports.