There is one thing that Britt and I will stress over and over again… data. 

• The use of data from your store. 
• The use of data from your subscribers. 
• The use of data from your A/B split testing. 
• And of course the use of data from your sales.

In this post, we show you how to get some of the data directly from your store.  Have you wondered how a customer found your site?  Setting up google analytics (which we will describe in another post) is one way.  But for a first pass, lets use the data that can be found in your store.

Let me show you where to find it:

First login into your store manager page.

Locate the Statistics column in your store as shown below:

Select the References link.  When the page refreshes, the following screen will appear:

This page shows you a variety of things.

• Visits - how many people came to your site from a given URL
• Orders - how many orders were placed by these people
• Revenue - how much money did you make from these people
• And finally a revenue per visit metric.

Given the fact that Google controls over 65% of the search traffic on the internet, one would expect that most traffic and revenue would come from this search engine.  One interesting thing to note though, is that, even though MSN provides a lower search volume it is the second highest revenue per visit.  So why does this matter?

One simple reason is that it allows you to potentially spend a little more money on MSN ads and still get the same return on investment compared to the other search engines.  Depending upon your margins, these couple pennies per visit could make a huge difference in your overall profits for your business.

The above provides a nice summary of the information; however lets dig a little deeper to see what drives the visitors from these search engines to your site.

Click on the 'Details' to the right of the referring URLs.  When doing so, a page like the one shown below will appear:

I hid some of the keywords in this example to minimize any privacy issues.  This page provides which KEYWORDS drove traffic to your site from the Google search engine.  A couple key points can be seen on this page.

First, the word 'shoes' is definitely important in this site.  Google sees this site as important with regards to "___ shoes".  The next interesting point is that even though a lot of traffic comes from the top 10 keywords (or search words), none of them have converted!

The 335 orders all came from other words!  These words are known as the 'long tail'.  You should dive into these searches and orders and figure out what converted.  Remember driving traffic without turning a sale is useless traffic.

Dive into the data, slice and dice it, then take it back to your site and update your site to include these new keywords.

Doing so will ultimately help you get additional sales for your company.