Many small business online merchants I’ve talked to are running their web sites on the popular Yahoo! Merchant Services platform. I ran across a service today that could potentially be extremely useful for those Yahoo! Merchant Services store owners that keep a keen eye on their web analytics.
Monitus has two services for Yahoo! Merchant Services store owners that are, in concept, extremely useful. The first is a connector for Google Analytics that allows store owners to track conversions by keyword. Why is this significant? Since I installed Google Analytics on my Yahoo! Merchant Services site many months ago, I’ve been trying to figure out how to track keyword conversion. Keyword conversion is important to understand which words users type into search engines actually result in a sale. Understanding this has some beneficial implications.
Second, Monitus offers a Yahoo! Store cart recovery service. This service allows you to collect information about abandoned shopping carts. Having the email address of a user who abandoned the shopping cart would allow you, the merchant, to send an offer to that customer in hopes that they will return and complete the purchase. This service is a brilliant idea.
I haven’t used Monitus’ services, though I’d like to try them out and implement them on my site. Unfortunately in my case, the Monitus folks have chosen to price this service on a subscription basis. I’d rather purchase the license for the code and extend it to fit my needs, like building an automated email system that emails customers who abandon carts a coupon code.
In any case, if you operate a Yahoo! store, you should watch Monitus. They obviously have a keen understanding of web analytics.
April 8th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Anthony says:
Good info…but why do I need Monitus to impliment the Google Analytic codes…All a store owner have to do is add the codes to the header tags of your store variable.
April 8th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Rick Whittington says:
Anthony – the answer is that you can install Google Analytics code using the Yahoo Store editor, but you can’t use the e-commerce analysis functions because of a well-known cookie issue. Because the transaction doesn’t occur on your domain (it occurs on Yahoo’s), your transactional data can’t be sent to Google Analytics without a work-around.