Netsuite03 Feb 2006 12:44 am

How to mine your site’s search stats in Netsuite

One of the weaknesses of ASP hosted E-Commerce system Netsuite is that there’s no way to access statistics on users who are searching on your site (note this is different than a user searching in a search engine and landing on your site). They will eventually implement it, which is good for the following reasons:

  • Hard to find product. Search logs give you insight into what is for many the last chance to find something on your site. Chances are the most frequently searched for terms are hard to find on your site (or you don’t carry them). This is a great way to find additional content/products/etc to add to your site. You want your least popular/profitable products to be the most commonly searched for terms, definitely not anything you are pushing.

  • Check the results. A user searching on your site is not always an indication of a navigation failure – some users simply prefer it and try it first. Check the most searched terms to make sure the results are helpful and bring up the correct categories, product or information items (Netsuite doesn’t currently index knowledge bases, even if they are published). If you aren’t getting the search results you want, I have some tips at the end of this post on how to tweak them.

  • Search percentage. Look at the percentage of people searching – total number of searches for a time period divided by the number of unique visitors. You have to know something about your visitors to draw conclusions from this, but I would say unless your site is just huge and broad, you want this to be a low number. A retailer client of mine has a ratio of .036.

  • Identify navigation problems. Your search logs shouldn’t have any terms that are very popular – optimally you want a lot of terms searched for seldomly. If you have any terms (or a few)that are significantly more than the top 10 or 15, it’s a good indication that you aren’t giving the user the proper cues to find the content, or are landing them (through natural listings or PPC) on the wrong page.

Great, so how do I get this data now?

(more…)

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Netsuite15 Jan 2006 09:48 pm

How to set up Google Analytics in Netsuite

For those who don’t know, Netsuite is a hosted, ASP model ERP solution – you can manage your entire site and back-end inventory and accounting with one package, all through your browser. I spend a lot of time with their system, and will be posting on occasion tutorials, reivews, complaints and praise.

Google Analytics is actually Urchin web stats, which Google bought and retooled. They started offering it free in late 2005, and it’s comparable in power and usability to some very expensive packages. I highly recommend it.

  1. First, you must have a Google Analytics account with an available profile – you can find out more here.
  2. Create a custom tag named GOOGLYTICS (or whatever name you prefer). Add <GOOGLYTICS> to the Footer section under site templates. It really only needs to be someplace on each page, inside the <body> and </body> tags. Your code will look something like this: 
    
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"> 
</script> 
<script type="text/javascript"> 
    _uacct = "UA-######-1"; (the # will be replaced with your account number)
    _udn="none"; 
    _ulink=1; 
    _ucsr="gcid"; 
    _uctr="keyword"; 
    urchinTracker(); 
</script>
  3. For the Checkout and My Account tabs, replace the GOOGLYTICS tag with the following (more…)

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & E-Commerce14 Jan 2006 02:13 am

The Six Pillars of E-Commerce Web Sites

The Six Pillars of an E-Commerce Site


Much of this can be applied to any type of site, but my focus will be specific to E-Commerce web sites. I’ve never put these concepts down on paper before, so I will likely be making changes over time as I refine my ideas. I believe this list covers the essentials to E-Commerce success – if any of these areas are weak, it will affect the others and the ultimate success of your site.

  1. Keyword Research:
    You must know what words people are using when trying to find what you’re offering. Frequently experts in a business use different terms than a layman would. The concept of the long tail is alive and well here, and pays excellent dividends. Chances are there are thousands of keyword phrases that would be worth pursuing. Many keyword research tools like this one will also help you figure out which have the most search volume, which will be a crucial factor in how you set up 2, 3, and 4.

  2. Content & Conversion:
    It won’t help you much if you get 5k visitors/day if they all leave immediately. Readable, compelling, original content will be key to success in the future. This takes work, no doubt about it. Talk to your customers, poll your customer service people for common questions, and look at your competitors. Content can be pre-emptive answers to common questions (e.g., a site that sells flowers could make an article about how to set up delivery, how long to expect the flowers to be fresh, or how to best feed them). Content can also be ‘infotainment’. Write an article on an interesting topic that is also educational. If you sell car parts, create articles about the history of a certain car or about the evolution of the tail fin. (more…)

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Netsuite09 Jan 2006 02:15 am

The Basics of Netsuite SEO

Introduction


This article is written for a web-savvy user who is interested in optimizing their Netsuite hosted E-Commerce site for better placement in search engines’ natural search engine results pages (SERPs). It assumes a good deal of knowledge about Internet basics, but anyone actively involved on the technical side of a Netsuite store should be familiar with the terms and concepts I use. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

A Brief Introduction to Search Engine Optimization


I don’t want to reinvent the wheel too much here. There are many great guides to understanding SEO, here are a few of my favorites:

The short version is that any web site plan needs to include more than just making search engines happy. A successful site will need to work on all 6 of the E-commerce pillars, as I cover in the linked article.

For now I want to focus on Netsuite and the tools it offers (and workarounds for those it doesn’t) to improve your SERP placement. Keep in mind that the success of everything I’m talking about below depends on how thoroughly you’ve researched the important keywords for your topic and structured your site to direct traffic to the appropriate areas. Much more about this later.

Things Netsuite Does Well


Unique Title and Meta Tags
The title tag is the single biggest bang for the buck SEO technique, and Netsuite allows you to create an unique one for each page. (more…)

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Being & Nothingness05 Jan 2006 03:59 pm

The Last Blog, Ever

My photoNever one to be caught off-guard a couple of years too late, it’s high time I hopped on the blogging bandwagon. I’m pretty sure I’m the last person on the planet to start one, so I’ll turn out the lights when I’m done.

I started my consulting business in late ‘03, after the dotcom I worked for went belly-up and I tried some college, but found little practical value in it. I’d been working on web sites and doing some freelance LAN support for years, I think the first commercial site I created was in 2000. So it was a natural step for me to step out on my own. I was lucky enough to pick up some terrific clients very quickly, and have been progressively busier each month.

I currently manage 3 commercial sites plus my own, and manage the LANs of a few local companies. I have a good overall understanding of what works on the Internet, including SEO, usability, content, E-commerce conversion, and advertising.

I’ll mostly be posting information that I think people will find useful – if you have any suggestions or topics you’d like to learn more about, let me know :D

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