Tracking 404 error pages with Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Web Analytics

One of the many benefits of having a Yahoo! Store as your e-commerce platform is that you get Yahoo! Web Analytics. Not only that, but the tagging is done automatically for you and aspects that typically require some sort of setup, such as e-commerce, site search and action tracking, are done for you out of the box.

The flipside is that the YWA tracker can’t be modified if you use auto-tagging. So, things like custom fields require that you install the tracking code manually. Maybe not the end of the world, but then you’d have to modify templates, and auto-tagging is so much easier.

I came across one case where the lack of auto-tagging customization prevented me from tracking 404 error pages unless I went to manual tagging. Or so I thought! Sometimes a little hack can go a long way.

Below is an excerpt of the presentation I gave at the recent Yahoo! Merchant Summit.