Brief Introduction to An Ecosystem for E-Commerce and Online Marketing

It is no longer about capturing data. It is about how to interpret it and how to use it.

The main goal of E-Commerce and Online Marketing is to reach as many targeted customers as possible. With the assistance of many analytics tools, not only can you know the number of customers, you also can analyze your customers from multiple perspectives and therefore make better marketing plans.

I don’t have an E-Commerce site. I will use my blog to demonstrate how to understand your site viewers and what you can possibly do to attract more traffic.

This is the Admin Dashboard.

Scroll down, you will see the interesting part – SEO score and Site Statistics.

What do they mean? They are different plug-ins I use to analyze my content and viewers.

SEO score tells me whether the blog I wrote is easy to understand or not, whether the content can have a high ranking in search engine. It provides a checklist and auto analyze the blog post from images, keywords, to word count,readability, etc. Green color means good score. Red color means need improve. According to the result, you can adjust or amend the blog post.

Site Statistics tells me how many viewers do I get per day, per month, per year. It also can tell me which page of my websites gets more views.

If I expand the Site Statistics, I can see more options. Here comes the analytics part. For example, from the statistics below I get to know the top view pages. How do I keep my viewers within my site and prevent them from going out? One strategy can be in these top view pages, I provide attractive links or images that direct to other pages of my site.

Site Statistics also captures the search terms, which means what are the terms that people search on the internet bring them to my site. In the screenshot below, it shows most people came into my site through searching my name. In terms of E-Commerce or Online-Marketing, this is not a good search term because this is not something people will often search. Perhaps only the HR will search my name. LOL. If you are doing a movie online marketing or e-commerce site, perhaps what you need to do is to have keywords like Civil War appearing on your site. The reason is Civil War might be searched more often, when people search it, the chance of them accessing your site is higher.

Referrers is another great feature of Site Statistics. It tells me from which channel people come into my sites besides search engine. In the screenshot below, Facebook is the largest channel. That’s because I often post my blog link on facebook. Search Engine comes into the second place, which is not bad. For actually online marketing and e-commerce, the ultimate goal is to push Search Engine to the first place and maximize its percentage.

However, you perhaps notice there are many channels where the viewers come from, e.g., Facebook Mobile, Twitter, Google Plus. What can I interpret from here? There are lots of knowledge you can get after doing some sort of analysis. For example, your site needs to be mobile responsive because a huge number of viewers are using mobile channel. You need to maintain multiple social medias such as Twitter,  Google +, etc because these channels can bring you views. This is what I mentioned in the title Ecosystem. All social medias must be inter-connected and inter-pointed. For example, your Youtube videos should have annotations pointing to your website. Your website should link to Twitter. Your website should provide video gallery linking back to Youtube. It is a net. Each node helps to promote the other nodes.

Here I also want to introduce another powerful tool, Google Analytics. Below is screenshot provided by Google Analytics on what technologies are used by my viewers. For example, you can see most of them are using iPhone. This piece of information is very important if you are doing e-marketing. What does it tell you? If one day you want to develop an app for your site, you must have an iOS version. Another example, there are many users view the site on wide screens. In this way, I must make sure my site displays well on the wide screen. And perhaps I need to use images with high resolution.

Google Analytics is so powerful and it gives you summaries of different aspects of your site in different kinds of charts. For example, the screenshot below shows that you can see who are the users (Users), when is the traffic (Traffic), where does the user come from (Location), etc.

If I select Location, it shows me which countries of people view my sites. If you have a marketing or e-commerce site and your target country is America, you can use this to monitor whether you are targeting the right location or not.

In my next blog, I am going to share with you how to create and monitor marketing campaign crossing platforms.