Use Analytics Software to Improve Conversions

3 replies
Hello all,

This is my first real post on here. I found this a few months ago and started soaking this up while putting together a couple of sites. I have to say that this is one of the best free (and some paid) resources out there. Just great stuff. I thought I'd give back a little from what I've been learning over the past couple of months on a few of my sites.

I put together a review site a couple of months ago, and on that site I set up Amazon affiliate links. Well, one thing I failed miserably on was the placement of these ads. A rookie mistake was thinking that people always landed on your homepage, which is where I was placing my links and ads, when in reality this is almost never the case. By reviewing Google Analytics, I found out that people were actually landing on my content pages. So, naturally, I started focusing on putting the affiliate links on my content pages. Well, I was only getting a few click throughs, and I realized I must be missing something. So, that led me to search for ways to determine how people were navigating the page. I mean, I didn't want to just bombard users with tons of links and ads muddying up the content..so, that led me to an analytics program called Open Web Analytics. The analytics portion of it is ok. I don't love it and I don't hate it. Overall, I'd say it's almost as good as Google Analytics. The part that I fell in love with and actually just stumbled upon was the DOM Streaming portion. Essentially what this does is somewhat "record" how users interact with your webpage. This means you can see the mouse movement, clicks, etc. While this is nowhere near perfect and I find that it only works a portion of the time, when you do get a nice recorded session you can get a glimpse into how people navigate your pages. This adds some overhead to your site as there are quite a few AJAX posts to your server to help log the movements and actions of the users on your page, but it's worth testing out if you're trying to find ways to improve your conversion rates.

Hopefully someone else will find this information useful as I didn't even know this existed! I was just looking for an alternative to giving Google even more of my data!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Allen
untetheredincome.com
#amazon #analytics #conversions #improve #software
  • Profile picture of the author petemcal
    Where do you access the data through an online log in like in analytics or is the data downloaded to your server?
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    • Profile picture of the author Allenerb
      Right now I'm using a mixture of software. While I have the logs, I typically don't go digging through them, although I have in the past. Currently, as mentioned above, I use Open Web Analytics just so I can see the DOM streams. However, my favorite analytics software I'm currently using is Piwik - I've not posted enough on the forum to include a link so just google Piwik. I could go on about the things I love about it, but to keep it on topic here, they show you where the user came from, what page they landed on, and where else they went all on your main dashboard. If you want more detail, all you have to do is go into the visitor tab and hit the visitor log sub tab to just keep on looking through what people are doing on your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author petemcal
    Unless you are looking for specific mouse tracking data and on page analysis I think using cpanel stat software is usually fine. Google analytics is a really nice piece of software, I don't personally mind giving away data to google.
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    Follow Pete on Twitter #SEO #Marketing
    "It's like if Einstein did SEO"
    "Much shorter than Shakespeare"
    "I would follow Pete over Jesus Christ himself"
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