Inventory levels…check
Promotions, deals and coupons…check
Extended hours…check
Gift wrap…check
Data capture and mining…what?

First off, I’m assuming you have a website. You DO have a website, don’t you?

There are dozens of things you should be doing to optimize traffic to your business through online and retail channels. I won’t get into any of those this time (see the end of this post for links); instead I want to make sure you’re aware of two tools you need to use to improve your website and your understanding of your website visitors. When February rolls around and you want to analyze your sales, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to start gathering this information now!

1. Website Grader.com

Find out when Google last crawled your site, how many pages it has indexed and the number of inbound links (other sites that link to yours).

Enter your website address into the form on websitegrader.com and get a marketing-oriented analysis of your website that will highlight some potential deficiencies and areas for improvement. A marketing effectiveness score is provided that you can use as a simple reference as you improve the marketability of your site. According to a recent survey, here is what people are looking for on your site.

Website Grader is run by HubSpot who provides other awesome tools and content to help small businesses be more successful with their online marketing intelligence. For more on inbound marketing (getting found online), see the book by the same name.

2. Google Analytics – Website Visitor Traffic Analysis

Once the dust (or rather snow) settles and the holiday shopping frenzy is over, will you have the information you need to do a thorough post-mortem? Best sales ever? Worst sales ever? Flat growth? Ok, this one is simple accounting but do you know the who, what, where, when, why and how? You don’t know? You are using Google Analytics on your website, right? If you aren’t sure, find out now. If you don’t have it, add it now, I’ll wait.

Here are just a few of some really useful statistics you can find in Google Analytics. Check out Web Analytics Key Definitions on Wikipedia for more descriptions as some of the metrics are not entirely intuitive. This is an enterprise-quality tool that allows you to create custom filters, reports, goal-setting targets and has many other functions. Here are just a few of things you can track.

* Top Entry (landing) Pages – The pages people are first landing on when they find your site
* Top Exit Pages – The pages people are on when they leave your site
* Top Content – The pages on your site are getting the most traffic
* Geographic Location – Didn’t you know that 30% of your site visitors were not domestic?
* Mobile Visitors – You might not be getting many visitors from smartphones yet but you should make sure your site looks good on the most popular mobile platforms: iPhone, Android, BlackBerry

Google Analytics Setup Checklist
27 Features that Make Google Analytics Best of Breed

Excellent Links!
Holiday Tips from Practical ECommerce
101 Ecommerce Tips to Boost Holiday Sales from Volusion

Article by Mike Catalfamo

Mike Catalfamo has over 10 years' experience delivering integrated eCommerce and EDI solutions and is the Technical Sales Engineer at eBridge Software Inc. When not chasing around his toddler, a few of Mike's interests include playing music, photography, reading, practicing GTD and exploring ways to make the most of technology to integrate and automate information and systems.

Technology Corner Black Friday, ecommerce 2010, Mike C, Shopping, stats, website traffic