Your web statistics program that comes with your website
probably tells you quite a bit of information
about which search engines and directories
bring you the most traffic. What most of them don't tell you is
whether the visitor actually makes a purchase. This is where Search
Engine Tracker by James Harrel of Copernicus
comes in to play. It will tell you how many click-throughs and buy-throughs
you have had per search engine and directory. You can see an example
of this on the left. You can sort by either click-through or buy-through.
Unlike basic web statistic programs, you can view all the results
that are available instead of just the top ten, etc. Many clients
get despondent when they hear people on the Merchant users list give very
low shop-to-sale ratios. There could be a million reasons why a
shopper didn't make a purchase other than poor navigation, high shipping
prices, etc. Some of those reasons are:
They were simply browsing and planning on coming back later.
They were looking for content and found your store.
Search Engine Tracker doesn't just give you this great information
about search engines and directories. It also tells you what keywords
and phrases people use to find your store and if they make a purchase. The
keywords summary is sortable by either click-through or buy-through.
This can be extremely useful information when choosing keywords and phrases
to target with your search engine campaign. The example you see is
from a store that was using Search Engine Tracker from the beta development
phase and thus had multiple keywords not being recorded. There were also
two search engines configured in the module with the wrong query string
which resulted in the loss of more keywords. These problems have
been fixed. This module was primarily intended to track hits coming
directly into Miva Merchant store pages (i.e. merchant.mv?) and not static
pages. Kudos to James Harrel for his efforts to make Tracker work
with static pages. He now has javascript that you can place on static
pages that will pass along the information to Miva Merchant. On
our client's site, the code had to be inserted on over 1000 static pages
of content. The first version of the javascript did not work correctly,
and we forgot to include the latest javascript tracking code with search
engine killer pages. After we fixed these problems, keywords started
showing much more than before.
Search Engine Tracker also has the option of viewing the
raw log file. It contains information like the date and time a person
entered your store, the query string used in the particular search engine
and directory, the specific search word or phrase used, the search engine
or directory, the Merchant screen entered, the basket id, and even the
order id if a purchase was made. The following is an example of
what information is contained in the raw log output. We entered
the query given and saw that the page entered was actually a static page
generated by Search
Engine Killer. For unknown reasons, the module reported the
store front as the screen entered.
Last
but not least, Search Engine Tracker has a configurable list of search
engines and directories with their corresponding query string for capturing
information. You can even add more search engines and directories
if you want. Click on the thumbnail image for a larger picture.
It comes configured with all the major search engines and directories
out-of-the box. Copernicus is good about making updates as search
engines change, large engines or directories are made known, etc.
All in all, the Search Engine Tracker is a bargain at $99.95.
It is compatible with both the MMUI and OpenUI look and feel, and available
for Miva Merchant version 4.x+ as well as compiled for version 4.14.
THINGS WE DON'T LIKE AS MUCH
Geared towards dynamic Miva Merchant pages at a time when we are encouraging
static content for search engine campaigns. However, we do appreciate
their ongoing efforts to make referrals from static pages more reliable.
THINGS WE WOULD LIKE TO SEE
Continued testing and improvement on tracking from static pages.
Actual page entered in store from search engine.
Our current rating of Search Engine Tracker is 4 out of 5 bananas.
We strongly recommend it.
