The Monitus Reporter – Edition 3.0

Monitus Inspector acquires two new tools

STORE EDITOR — A press release from the desk of the Inspector today announced it has just acquired two new tools in it’s fight against poor store performance: the Product Affinity report, and the Anchor Money report. The Product Affinity report will allow the Inspector to report on a page’s top-10 selling products. “For section pages, this can be particularly interesting, as it can hint at the order your products should appear in on the page” says the Inspector, reached at his office in your store editor. Common wisdom dictates that content “above the fold” (the region at the top of a web page before a user has to scroll down) is prime real-estate. In their busy lives, customers just don’t have the time to scroll anymore. “By knowing which products sell best for a particular landing page, you can re-order your section items so that your best sellers come first in the list, hence above the fold, and sell even more!” The second tool the Inspector was proud to show us, is called “Anchor Money”. “The goal of this report is to show you, for any given page on your store, which keyword brought the most revenue to the page it points to. So for instance, if on your home page you have a link to your fruit-flavored Dustbusters, you could know, using the Anchor Money report, that your best keyword that bring people on your homepage, and then eventually make it to the fruit-flavored Dustbusters page is “banana dust bunnies” – so make sure your fruit-flavored page contains that key phrase, and try to improve this page’s ranking for this particular key phrase so that users, in the future, go directly to it, instead of landing on your homepage and having to look for what they want.” The Inspector also noted that you could use this knowledge to set-up AdWords campaigns, or use Monitus.net’s PersonaQuest tool to maybe offer a help pop-up to these users, short of directing them to the page directly – maybe even with a rebate offer. “These two new reports make me one of the most insightful Yahoo! Store Inspector out there – and I do it all for your readers, the Yahoo! Store Merchants. It’s all about helping out as much as I can.”

Coupon? What Coupon?

YOUR DATA — Monitus.net’s offering just got a little sweeter once again, with two simple features aiming to make coupon handling easier for merchants. In their Cart Recovery product, merchants can now see if a customer got a discount (used a coupon) when they converted. Another thing the folks at Monitus.net felt was missing, was in the checkout error message data sent to Google Analytics, (GA) when a customer uses an invalid coupon code. Previously, the event would only send the message the customer saw, to the effect that the entered coupon code was invalid. But the merchant would not know what code was in play. Now the GA event will also include the coupon code the customer used, so that they can hopefully spot people trying to use old codes and maybe bring back an obviously popular rebate they offered in the past.

PersonaQuest capitalizes on Google Analytics’ new non-interacting events

GOOGLE ANALYTICS — In previous versions of PersonaQuest, variations could be tracked through custom variables in Google Analytics. (GA) The major downside of variables is that you can only have 5, so they quickly come into conflict with one another. On the other hand, GA vents were not an option because sending an event on a landing page produces a second page view for the [age, drastically reducing your site’s bounce rate. Google heard it’s users pleas and added non-interacting events: events that, when triggered, do not count as a page view and, hence, do not count in your bounce rate calculations. The fine Monitus/net folks jumped on the bandwagon and changed the old PersonaQuest variables usage into non-interacting events, so they have the best of both worlds: no bounce-rate impact, and unlimited calls. GA reports all issued a sigh of relief and demonstrated an improved sense of self-worth.

“All States” defaces program’s user interface!

MONITUS — Data produced in response to an Access to Information request filed by the Monitus Reporter suggest the PersonaQuest user interface was defaced every time a user selected all states as the target of a Geographical rule. The rules list would overrun the browser’s screen, and spill-over on an unsightly second line. A source who wishes to remain anonymous, said it was shoddy work by the programmer. The Reporter requested an interview with Monitus.net’s programmer, but was told the programmer was crying of shame in his basement for a week or two. The ugly bug apparently had been fixed at the time of going to press.