You can now use single-use coupons in our cart recovery service and our web personalization platform PersonaQuest. As the name suggests, single-use coupons can only be used once. One issue with generic coupons is that they could be disseminated far more widely than intended. This can not only result in lower margins, but it’s also hard to tell how effective coupons are if you don’t know how many people have been exposed to them. Plus of course you may be giving coupons to visitors who do not “need” them – those folks who would have placed an order without the coupon.

What I am most excited about single-use coupons is in website testing.  Particularly with dynamic onsite targeting you can display the coupon to only a specific segment of visitors. Use your web analytics to find out when visitors abandon – look at landing pages and keywords with high bounce rates, visits to transaction or page depth – and target those.

It’s of course still about the offer, right? You can test the type of coupon – $ off, % off, free shipping – and see what works best. You might find that the type of coupon varies across segments! Well, you can now test this and have all the necessary data directly in web analytics to draw conclusions from, including actual coupon usage.

So how does this all work?

You start by creating a series of single-use coupons in the coupon manager of your Yahoo! Store.

Then you download the coupon series

and upload in your Monitus Tools account:

You will get a nice table of imported coupons:

As coupons are distributed to visitors you can see the numbers decreasing. You can set up an alert if the number of coupons is getting below a certain threshold and you can add more coupons.

Now for the fun stuff!

All you then have to do is specify the coupon code pool when you set up a new PersonaQuest rule and add the tag on the desired page and location:

and PersonaQuest will start distributing those single-use coupons to each visitor in the desired segment (in this case to visitors to the site on a particular date).

The fine folks at ROI Revolution are putting together a free webinar for Yahoo! Store merchants to help them get the most out of Google Analytics. It’s always great to see companies coming up with products and services specifically for the Yahoo! Store platform. Be sure to sign up for the webinar and follow ROI Revolution’s excellent blog.

Disclaimer: You will notice my involvement in the webinar, so I am obviously biased. That’s intentional and I am very proud to be playing a small part in it. But don’t let that distract you one bit!

We have released a new tool for our Monitus Tools subscribers: Keyword Monkey. Credit goes to Rob for the name, which we thought was kind of catchy…

So what does Keyword Monkey do?

In a nutshell, it keeps track of all keywords that brought shoppers to your store from search engines, both converting and non-converting. In your monitus.net account you can see a nice table of these keywords. But keyword monkey goes further than that: it tells you if a particular keyword is actually present in your store! When you find a converting keyword that is not in your store, consider adding it to create a more relevant landing page. Keyword Monkey also lets you do a  search on Google, Yahoo! and MSN to find out what they think the most relevant landing page is for your store.

Keyword Monkey also emails you your top converting keywords on a daily or weekly basis. You don’t need Google Analytics for Keyword Monkey, but your XML feed has to be enabled so that we can do the content check.

What’s next?

We have big plans for Keyword Monkey: we are working on functionality that will assist in content creation for both store content and ad copy. More later, but in the meantime give Keyword Monkey (along with our other tools) and try.

As seen on the Unofficial Google Analytics Blog from ROIrevolution.com. Pretty much "the" data you need if you do Adwords campaigns.

We have added a new tool today. It’s called ZERO – ZEro Results
Optimizer. Cheesy name perhaps, but we think it’s quite useful as it
allows you to make the Yahoo! Store site search a little better.
Details are here: http://www.monitus.net/content/blogcategory/31/83/

If
you want to use this feature, simply log in and click on "Your Tools".
Click the checkbox and customize the text and enter any search terms
you want to display. Save settings. Your custom zero results page
should be visible on your store immediately.

Many thanks and let us know what you think.

I have a spare Google Analytics invitation code if anyone wants it. Getting an invitation can take as much as 30 days after you apply for one. Only condition is that you have to try out our Google Analytics connector for Yahoo! Store.

First come first serve!

I participated in a Google Analytics webinar today given by the folks at roirevolution.com. Very informative and they even had time to answer individual questions. They seem to be doing those demos very frequently, so sign up for one of those free webinars.

The Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik is a newly launched blog that has an interesting take on GA and other web analytics packages. What to do with all this data…

I came across the roirevolution.com blog today looking for tips and tricks that could be useful for Yahoo! Store merchants using Google Analytics. There is some very good information in there. Check them out.

Just wanted to provide a little more info about our Google Analytics connector for Yahoo! Store. If I had to make a choice, I would pick "Overall Keyword Conversion" as one of the most important reports to look at:

What does this report tell you?

This report gives you a list of all your keywords – both converting and non-converting – along with Transactions/visit and $/visit.

Digging around this data reveals many interesting facts:

1) First of all, you will likely see lots of non-converting keywords and far fewer converting keywords. That’s pretty logical. But you will see an astonishing amount of unique keywords. Have you heard about the long tail of search? Ask Rob about the long tail and what to do with those non-converting keywords.

2) You would have thought that people who want to buy directly from you would type in your domain name directly into the browser. Wrong! A significant number of people type in your domain name (or a variation thereof) into Google, Yahoo, or MSN to find you. Bear this in mind.

3) Look at your top converting keywords. Is your site optimized for those? You may even find that some of your best converting keywords aren’t even on your site!

4) Misspellings. Do you see misspellings of your products in the report? Again, bear this in mind when crafting content for your site.

5) In the Keyword column (note: the keyword column’s width is reduced for privacy reasons) you can click on the "+" to see where the traffic from those keywords came from. Which search engine converts better? How effective are your PPC campaigns?

I realize that merchants lead busy lives, so I hope this information is useful. I will be adding more tips and tricks in the future. Please submit your own. I would like to end up with a Google Analytics to-do list for busy Yahoo! Store merchants.

Incidentally, the ability to see and analyze conversion data for keywords on a product level has been the main driving force behind the development of our Google Analytics connector. Grabbing transaction data (like Order Number and Order Total) on the confirmation page is relatively straightforward with the new checkout manager, but in my opinion the key is to keep referrer data – including keywords – all the way to the confirmation page.

Shoppers not only abandon shopping carts, but they may also start the checkout process without completing the transaction. Research has shown that efforts to recover shopping carts can result in significant increases in conversion rate. Well, I think we have a pretty good solution for the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions platform, as part of our new Monitus Tools service.

If you could give this a try, I’d be very grateful. We have a one-month trial, but there will be a free basic version of the cart recovery service that merchants can continue using.

View the Yahoo! Store cart recovery tour.

One important note: This service will only work with the new checkout manager. We have made the decision to only support the new checkout manager because that’s what all merchants will be using sooner or later (and I personally believe it’s very good).