any software vendor using a 3rd party shopping cart

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1 Version last updated: August 2010

2 The Analytics industry has evolved a great deal since the last version of this book. Tools got better & faster including amazing features like Segmentation or Intelligence that many users didn t even think of. Google Analytics is no exception, being considered by many the leading tool for web analysts. This ebook looks at the best ways software vendors and developers can use Google Analytics to gain actionable data. We are going to focus on 4 issues: Setup Google Analytics (GA) for your website; Define goals for your website and online activity; Get all your sales data in your Analytics tool and see what makes them grow; Identify what drives the sales for your web business and how Most of the implementation steps in this document are generally applicable to any software vendor using a 3 rd party shopping cart. However, some tricks are based on features designed specially by Avangate for the software vendors using the Avangate ecommerce Platform. 2

3 Table of Contents 1. Setup Google Analytics for your website Define objectives for your website and online activity Tracking downloads and downloaders Tracking users that get to the shopping cart Tracking sales Analytics and User Behavior Tracking how many trial users buy your product Segmenting is pure gold How much does a Download value to you? Cool tools to go along with Google Analytics Great Blogs to Follow Great Books to Read

4 1. Setup Google Analytics for your website When it comes to tracking software ecommerce websites, a few hacks need to be put up in place in order for Google Analytics to fully understand your website s traffic. The main issue is that users find details about your product on your website and when they decide to buy, are sent from your website to a third party shopping cart in order to finish a purchase. Teaching Google Analytics that it is the same user who interacts with your website and then with the shopping cart, as part of a single process of purchasing a software product, will give you lots of actionable data and lots of insights. These can be very helpful in emerging future strategies for growing your business. Just think about how cool it would be to know how different segments of users behave on your shopping cart, like from organic searches compared to paid searches, and why some have a bigger shopping cart abandonment rates than others. Don t have Google Analytics installed yet? All you need to do is go to and login with your Google Account. If you don t have one, just create a new account. All you ll need to do is to add your website to Google Analytics, which in exchange will provide a tracking code. 4

5 Google Analytics was the first product in the industry to introduce asynchronous tracking which has no to little effect on your website loading times. This ebook covers all the steps needed in order to switch to the new tracking code. So the first and most important step to start tracking the performance of your website is to install the tracking code on your website. However, because you will need to do a little bit more complex installation, you will have to perform a small detour before. On the tracking code that is provided, look for a code line that looks like this: _gaq.push(['_setaccount', 'UA-XXXX-XX']); In case you already have the Google Analytics code installed, look in the source code of your website for the tracking code or any of the lines: var pagetracker = _gat._gettracker("ua-xxxx-xx"); or _gaq.push(['_setaccount', 'UA-XXXX-XX']); Software vendors using the Avangate ecommerce Platform can login to the Avangate Control Panel account and access the Web 5

6 Analytics page which is part of the Marketing Tools section in the left menu. Here is what you should get: Figure 1 Web Analytics integration feature in the Avangate Control Panel Copy your Google Analytics ID (UA-XXXX-XX) code in the first provided field (Step 1). At Step 2, the Avangate platform will supply you with the code that needs to be installed on all your pages within your website, just before the </head> tag. Learn more. Important Note: If you have already installed the tracking code on your website, please replace it with the one provided through Step 2 of the Avangate CPanel Web Analytics Wizard. If you use other 3 rd party shopping carts, place the following code in both your website as well as the shopping cart pages: 6

7 <!-- google analytics --> <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq []; _gaq.push(['_setaccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-XX']); _gaq.push(['_setdomainname', 'none']); _gaq.push(['_setallowlinker', true]); _gaq.push(['_setallowhash', false]); _gaq.push(['_trackpageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createelement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = (' == document.location.protocol? ' : ' + '.googleanalytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getelementsbytagname('script')[0]; s.parentnode.insertbefore(ga, s); })(); </script> <!-- /google analytics --> Important Note: Don t forget to replace the UA-XXXX-X with your Google Analytics ID. Make sure you add the tracking code on all pages of the website in order to avoid any errors or inaccuracies in the gathered data. Here is a cool tool to check if all your pages have Google Analytics tracking code installed properly: You can also try the WASP tool crawling option to check how well the tracking code has been installed. 7

8 2. Define objectives for your website and online activity When you started your business you surely had some goals on your mind. Think of them and try to find the indicators that would make you say Hey, this is what I wanted! What we are going to ask you now is to project your business goals into Metrics and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) that can be measured with Analytics tools. A metric is a measured value. For example, the number of visitors, the bounce rate and the time spent on site are metrics. A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a metric that echoes organizational goals. It is decided by the company management and not some analytics tool, providing context and leads to action. For a software company, a possible KPI can be: the number of downloads, the number of trial users that buy a product or the number of software users that look on the website for support. Check out the Big Book of KPIs for more details. 8

9 3. Tracking downloads and downloaders Now that you have Google Analytics installed, finding how many users click on a download link is not that difficult. You can go one step further and track the behavior of users that download your product as well. This method is specially created for all those websites where clicking the download button directly starts the download. We do recommend having Thank You for Downloading pages which are very easy to track (just place the standard Google Analytics tracking code on the pages), but for those of you who don t intend to do that, here is what you can do in 4 easy steps to track downloads: Step 1: Adding some code Add the following code between <head> and </head> on all your website pages on which the download can be initiated. <script type="text/javascript"> function setiframe() { var aviframe = document.getelementbyid('av_iframe').innerhtml = '<iframe src ="/software_download.html" style="border:none;width:1px;height:1px;" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>'; } </script> 9

10 Step 2: Modify the download button or link Add the following code to all your download links or buttons: onclick="settimeout(setiframe, 2000);" For example if your download link is: <a title="download" href="download/software.exe">download Now</a> modify it to: <a title="download" onclick="settimeout(setiframe, 2000);" href="download/software.exe">download Now</a> Step 3: Add some more code to your website This time add it directly after the download button. It s a hidden div with no content in it, so no need to worry about SEO issues. onclick="settimeout(setiframe, 2000);" 10

11 Step 4: Create a file called software_download.html directly in your website root Inside this file you can put all the tracking codes you want. Google Analytics, Google AdWords, anything. The idea is that when a user starts a download, this file is loaded and tells your tracking tools that a certain user just started a download. <script type="text/javascript"> function setiframe() { var aviframe = document.getelementbyid('av_iframe').innerhtml = '<iframe src ="/software_download.html" style="border:none;width:1px;height:1px;" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>'; } </script> Now, the tracking codes Well, as I have told you at the beginning, you can track downloaders. What does this mean? It means that every time a user downloads your software, a certain label is attached to that user, so every time she comes back to your website, you will know about it. And more, you ll be able to understand their behavior on your website and most important: How many of them end up buying your software? 11

12 All you have to do is to add an enhanced version of the Google Analytics Code in the software_download.html file you have just created on your website root folder. The code should look like this: <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq []; _gaq.push(['_setaccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-XX']); _gaq.push(['_setdomainname', 'none']); _gaq.push(['_setallowlinker', true]); _gaq.push(['_setallowhash', false]); _gaq.push(['_setcustomvar', 5, 'Downloader', 'English Trial', 1]); //label people who download the product _gaq.push(['_trackpageview','/downloads/software/']); (function() { var ga = document.createelement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = (' == document.location.protocol? ' : ' + '.googleanalytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getelementsbytagname('script')[0]; s.parentnode.insertbefore(ga, s); })(); </script> (replace UA-XXXX-XX with your Google Analytics Tracking ID) 12

13 If the above implementations are a little bit too complex for you, you can always go the simple way. However, the amount of data which will be available in Google Analytics will only be limited to how many people clicked the download link on your website. Just add the following JavaScript for the "on click" event of the download triggering link: <a href=" onclick="javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackevent', 'Trial downloads', 'Download']);"> All you have to do now is to go in your Google Analytics Account, where you will be able to see all the data in the Content > Event Tracking reports area: 13

14 4. Tracking users that get to the shopping cart By tomorrow, all your download data will be available in Google Analytics. How about sales? Well, as sales come through a third party shopping cart (Avangate ecommerce Platform), we decided to help you with sales data through our Web Analytics wizard, accessible in the Avangate Control Panel. Mainly, there are 2 important steps that need to be followed, but let s go inside Google s mind and understand the process that needs to happen in order for the tracking to be accurate. Google needs to understand that the same user who has been in your website continued his session in the Avangate Shopping Cart. Google also needs to understand where your visitor came from. Without any hacks, Google will see your own website as the referrer for a certain sale, this way being of no help to you. First of all, make sure you have the right tracking code on your website. If you haven t modified your tracking code with the one provided by the Avangate CPanel Web Analytics section, please do so now. 14

15 Secondly, you need to have the tracking code installed on the shopping cart. How to do that? It s simple: add exactly the same code you have added to your website within all your shopping cart templates files, just as stated by Step 3 or the Avangate Web Analytics Wizard. In order to do this, go to your template files by quick searching for templates, as shown in the image. Figure 3 Getting to Interface Template Files by using quick Search. Once inside this section, access all the template files you have created for your shopping cart and add the tracking code just as shown in the image below. 15

16 Please make sure all the template files have the tracking code installed, as leaving only one file aside can create accuracy problems in the data you receive. At this point, Google Analytics is prepared to understand that the user who enters your shopping cart is the same with the one that just left your website. We are just one step away. Google Analytics works with first party cookie settings, so in order to help him understand what really happens, we need to help him copy the data from the cookie within your website to the cookie that is set by Google Analytics on the Avangate platform. Fortunately, Google provides a little hack to make this work. 16

17 In order to help Google get all the data about your visitors, you need to add the following code to all your Buy Now links or any other links that send the user to your shopping cart pages. If your Buy Now link looks like this: <a href=" Now</a>, it should be modified in order to look like this (add the onclick Javascript action): <a href=" onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', this.href]); return false;">buy Now</a> If you are using forms in order to send users to the shopping cart, you need to modify your forms source code to look like this (add the onsubmit Javascript action): <form name="name" method="post" onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_linkbypost', this]);"> The above hack helps Google Analytics (GA) copy all the user details from your websites cookie to the cookie set up on the shopping cart. Now, Google Analytics knows that it is dealing with the same user and it will know all the details about that user: where did she come from, how many times she has visited the website, what pages she has seen etc. If a user finishes a transaction, GA will be able to correlate that transaction to all that data about that specific user. 17

18 5. Tracking sales This step is the one that probably many of you are most interested in: How can Google tell you the profit that a certain keyword or referrer is bringing you? Knowing this will definitely help you find out how to better invest your budgets in your marketing campaigns. Will it be Paid Advertising, organic SEO or maybe getting as many reviews from bloggers as possible? This is the moment to find out. First of all, you need to let Google Analytics know that you are an ecommerce website so it will activate this function for you. In order to do this, login to your Google Analytics account, click the edit setting link for your website, access the editing profile settings and activate ecommerce tracking, just as shown in the image below. 18

19 Figure 5 Activating ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics All you need to do is to get back to the Avangate Control Panel and add the following code to your After Sale Message section: <script type="text/javascript"> _gaq.push(['_addtrans', myorder.refno, // Order ID myorder.idaffiliate, // Affiliation myorder.totalpriceusd, // Total myorder.taxusd, // Tax myorder.shippingusd, // Shipping myorder.city, // City myorder.state, // State myorder.country // Country ]); for(i = 0; i < myorder.productsinorder.length; i++) { _gaq.push(['_additem', myorder.refno, // Order ID myorder.productsinorder[i].id, // SKU myorder.productsinorder[i].name, // Product Name myorder.productsinorder[i].category, // Category myorder.productsinorder[i].priceusd, // Price myorder.productsinorder[i].quantity // Quantity ]); } _gaq.push(['_tracktrans']); </script> 19

20 The After Sale Message section was designed by Avangate in order to customize the way the Thank you for purchasing page will be displayed to the user. All the code added to this page will be executed only when a user will finish a purchase. The After Sale Message area can be found under Marketing Tools or by just typing after sale in the quick search box. Once entered, copy the following code (as provided in the last step of the Web Analytics wizard) in your After Sale Message box (see figure 8): Figure 6 (up) Identifying the AfterSale messages section in the Avangate Control Panel. Figure 7 (left) The customized tracking code for ecommerce tracking provided in the Web Analytics sections of the Avangate Control Panel. 20

21 Figure 8 The customized Google Analytics tracking code inside the After Sale Message; it must be placed above any other code in the page. You will get all the data within your Google Analytics Account. The ecommerce section in Google Analytics is active and is gathering data from your sales. Just after a few days of transactions, you ll be able to see something very similar to the following report: 21

22 22 Figure 9 ecommerce Reports as seen in Google Analytics.

23 6. Analytics and User Behavior At this point, everything is in place for gathering all the data from your website and shopping cart, but just owning the data is not going to boost up your sales. You must get actionable insights from your data, like: I need to treat differently trial users from new users. Google organic searches are bringing me lots of traffic but few conversions. Maybe it s time to focus on other keywords. Lots of users exit through the Terms and Conditions page. Maybe there is something wrong with it. All the users having Java Script disabled bounce, as they cannot access the website. Please note that the insights are unique for every website and software business, so the above are just pure examples. On the following chapters we will focus on answering as many possible questions like the ones above. The answers should provide solutions for improving your website and boosting your sales. 23

24 What is you conversion rate for purchases? When you started your online business, you probably had many goals in mind, but there is one we are sure we can guess: Increase your sales. It s time to see real time how this happens, so you don t have to wait till the end of the year or the semester to see how you are doing. A valuable report you ll get is to see why your sales increased and decreased over time. Maybe we are running a bit too far, as Google Analytics will never be able to answer the Why question, but it will give the hint towards the guilty factors. From there, answering the Why question is just a matter of testing or observation. So, let s set up the first Conversion Goal tracking in Google Analytics. Go to your website profile settings and, under the Conversion Goals and Funnels section, click the Add goal link: 24

25 Setting up Purchase Conversion Goals For purchases, a conversion will occur every time a user ends up on the Finish Purchase page on your shopping cart. Here is how you set up a Conversion Goal: Figure 11 Setting up a Goal for tracking completed purchases The Goal URL should be: \/order\/finish.php(.*) 25

26 Important Note: If you are a vendor selling software through Avangate, just fill in the fields exactly as shown in the image above. Here is where we go a step further. Wouldn t it be nice to find out how many users enter your shopping cart, through which page they enter and where do some of them abandon the shopping process? To do this, you need to set up the funneling. Follow the instructions, just as shown in fig. 12: Figure 12 Setting up funneling steps for monitoring abandonment rate through the Avangate shopping cart The steps in the above image are: \/order\/checkout.php(.*) \/order\/payment.php(.*) \/order\/verify.php(.*) 26

27 Note: leaving the Required Step checkbox unchecked will insure that you will get data on all the users entering the shopping cart, no matter what the entry point is. Otherwise, the funnel will only show the visitors coming through the Step 1. Having this done, a brand new report is going to be generated under your website s Analytics data. Click on the Conversion Goals menu item under your website reports and you will get a report that looks like this: Figure 13 Goals overview in Google Analytics Special attention should be paid to the Funnel Visualization chart for the purchase goal, where cart abandonment will be easy to understand. 27

28 28 Figure 14 Funneling overview for completed transactions in Google Analytics

29 Setting up Download Conversion Goals As the number of downloads is going to be an important performance indicator, here is how you setup a conversion goal for downloads: Figure 15 Setting up goal conversion tracking for software downloads. For better understanding on how to create Goals for your website for different actions, we recommend accessing the Google Analytics Documentation center and the Google Support Group. 29

30 Even More Value There is even more to understanding the value of your traffic. A special metric, called $index, has been implemented by Google. You will notice it as it s included in your content overview reports, just as shown in the image. Figure 16 The $index metric under the Top Content report in Google Analytics Here is a very good explanation of this metric: To summarize, $index tells us the value of a page that a user visits before landing on a goal page. That value is determined like this: (Goal value (if assigned) + ecommerce value) / Total number of visits on that page. At this point, Google Analytics can track your ecommerce transactions, which means that $index will automatically be 30

31 calculated for all the pages on the websites that users visit before buying. But another goal of your website is to increase the number of downloads. It would be great to find out which pages within your website are most valuable for creating downloads. You can deal with it in 2 ways. The easy but not so accurate way: give the value of 1 dollar (or whatever value you consider right) for every finished download. The little bit more difficult but much more accurate way: calculate how much a download values for you and setup that value for the goal. How do you do that? The following chapter is going to focus on this. What did we get so far? ecommerce tracking in place. Your sales data will be available in Google Analytics and not only that: you ll be able to know which of your online campaigns (banner or link exchange, PPC or organic keyword, blogger or download website) is bringing you most profit. Conversion Goals tracking for purchases and downloads. You know what pages within your website are most responsible for triggering purchases. 31

32 Shopping cart abandonment rate monitoring. You can make customizations on the pages where the users abandon the shopping cart in order to decrease this rate. Sometimes, even a small change of colors and layout can improve the user experience so she doesn t get lost in the process. 32

33 7. Tracking how many trial users buy your product We currently know how many downloads and sales occur. You would think that just dividing the number of downloads to the number of sales would come up with the conversion rate for download to buy. Well, why not be sure of it? You might be surprised by the actual data and being surprised is a good thing in this case. Knowing for sure will help you make the right decisions for improving things. No matter how good they are, they can always be better. One way to do it is to build special links or a special landing page for all the users that come through buying links within your software. The special link method has usability advantages, as users can be taken directly to the shopping cart, without any intermediate pages. In order to differentiate your buyers that come directly from your software product, a few parameters need to be added to the shopping cart link. It is important to make sure that this method does not interfere with your shopping cart functionality. Google offers a 3-step wizard for building the special links. By the third step, the application will generate a new link: 33

34 Figure 17 Create special links with Google Link Builder for tracking buyers coming from your software product. If you already use special links for users coming directly from the software links or buttons, include the above parameters. The Traffic Sources Overview "pie chart" from the Google Analytics default dashboard shows you the number of users that came directly from your software - they can be found among those labeled as "Other". What if you already use special parameters to identify users coming from your software? In this case, in order to leave the links intact and get actionable data immediately, make a 301 redirect for all the users coming from your software to the same link, but with the parameters in the image above included. 34

35 8. Segmenting is pure gold Having special links with tracking codes in your trial software kits or designated landing pages for the users that click the Buy Now button within the software is easier said than done. There is another way to track how many people that downloaded your software actually managed to buy it. Google Analytics now supports segmentation, so it can build reports on the fly just for a specific segment of traffic. The segment we are after: a segment of traffic of people who downloaded the trial. The quest: How many of them buy? Check out this video tutorial on how to create your first segment, if you are new to it. So, if you have done the above download tracking implementations, here is how your segment setup should look like: 35

36 Once you apply the segments, all the reports in Google Analytics will be limited only to the data about the people that downloaded your product. You can see from their referrers how many of them bought from you and after how many days. Segments are pure gold and we encourage you to play with them as much as possible. You can segment based on any metric you can think of. 9. How much does a Download value to you? Having ecommerce tracking activated, Google Analytics can report now the amount of money that comes into your account from all the sales. Divide that amount with the total number of downloads, and you will get exactly the value of a download for your business. Take this number and put it in the Goal Value box for Download Conversions you set up earlier. Make sure to make this update for all your profiles. 36

37 10. Cool tools to go along with Google Analytics WASP WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a specialized Firefox extension aimed at web analysts and web analytics implementation specialists, who want to do quality assurance and understand how their web analytics solution is implemented. It s a great plug-in that will help you debug any issues that might appear in your websites tracking. We also recommend their blog, which has great resources. Google Website Optimizer This is a tool provided by Google; you have to register or sign in before using it. It s an easy-to-use tool for testing site content that delivers actionable results to increase your conversion rate. Google Website Optimizer s strong asset is that it allows you to carry out loads of tests at the same time for: headlines, images, prices, offers and buttons. By means of Website Optimizer, you can obtain significant increases of the website conversion rates, of the time spent on your website and last, but not least, an increase of your visitors satisfaction with the website. But what does this tool really do? The answer is... testing in two ways: Run A/B experiments (compares the performance of entirely different versions of a page) 37

38 Run multivariate experiments (compares the performance of content variations in multiple locations on a page simultaneously) Lately, several Google Website Optimizer authorized companies appeared on the market. Future Now has really valuable resources on how to use Google Optimizer on their blog, Grokdotcom. For instance the 10 Minute Guide to Testing with Google Website Optimizer (PDF) is a very nice list with the most important things about this tool. We also recommend another article: 101 tips for Google website optimizer. Google Insights for Search Google Insights for Search, a further development of Google Trends, charts how often a particular search term is entered, relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world, in various languages. This tool also enables its users to make a comparison between the volume of searches between several items or terms. Google Insights for Search can be used as a crystal ball, a tool to predict the evolution of search volumes for some terms. A very cool feature is that it also shows related keywords that have large increases of searches. One of the assets that we consider of vital importance is the graphs, conducting comparative analyses for different terms. You just have to insert some keywords, select the 38

39 region and the time you are interested in and voilà: you get a comprehensive graphic with the search volume evolution. Ad Preview Tool Judging by its name, this is a tool by Google AdWords that just previews the way your site will look in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). What are the benefits of using this tool? First of all, you ll get a hint of how your ad will look like, and secondly, you will see the contextual placement of your ad, i.e. whether your ad has well defined keywords. Thirdly, you get improved location targeting for your ads. You can also refine the results page by adding location attributes and values manually to the URL of the ad preview page. Optional attributes include a target country, longitude/latitude coordinates, regions, and cities. In the U.S., you can also set a target ZIP code or designated market area (DMA). Generally speaking, the Ad Preview Tool provides "clean" search results page for a given keyword, domain, language and geography. This way, you can monitor your local campaigns in different areas (you shouldn't employ it for national campaigns). Nevertheless, you should take into account the "relativity" of this tool - the SERP won t look the same at all times. For more details about this tool, check out Google's Ad Preview Tool Gotchas You Should Know 39

40 Compete and Alexa Compete and Alexa can provide good insights on how your competition is standing. Follow them, learn from their mistakes and improvements and make sure you are on top of things. For any of the tools provided, context is very important. For example, learning the approximate traffic of your competitors can be easily linked to their back links. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to get access to this data. Search Engines Webmasters Tools These tools provided by search engines will give you a very good hint on how well your website is indexed, the main issues the crawlers discover and so on. You can also submit your sitemap to them and you will always know the status of your indexed pages. Try: Google Webmasters Tools Yahoo Site Explorer Center Crazy Egg While Google Analytics has a feature of showing the Website Overlay with the links clicking situation, unless some specific implementations are done, it s 40

41 pretty much off target when it comes to provide actionable data. Crazy Egg is a specialized tool that can provide a picture of where people clicked on your site. This tells you what s hot and what s not, so you can make changes that matter. It has a free service plan, as well as paid ones. iperceptions 4Q Avinash Kaushik introduced this permission based on-exit survey that provides an easy to deploy, use and analyze the framework, in order to get 4 answers that no website owner can live without. Surveys are powerful and can yield much deeper insights about the customer experiences on your website, helping you get a broader image about your visitors behavior. 41

42 11. Great Blogs to Follow Most of the information we put in this ebook comes from what we ve learned from great bloggers out there and experimented on our own. We d like to thank them for the great job they are doing - here is who we recommend: Occam s Razor by Avinash Kaushik Avinash s blog is a must for anyone interested in web analytics. With non technical approaches, he can make anyone understand what web analytics is all about. He is also the author of the much acclaimed book Web Analytics One hour a day. Check out the interview Avinash Kaushik gave for Avangate. Luna Metrics Blog On the other side, this is a very technical blog. The folks at Luna Metrics are Google Analytics authorized consultants and get very deep into technical implementations on analytics tracking codes. They also spend a lot of time helping others on the Google group especially created for Google Analytics support. 42

43 The Official Google Analytics Blog It's all about the latest news, tips, and resources straight from the Google Analytics team. Other blogs that are worth following: Juice Analytics Rich Page Ramblings - Web analytics insight, website optimization and reviews Immeria an immersion in web analytics Web Analytics Demystified Web Analytics World Other great places with resources for the Analytics Industry: Web Analytics Association Yahoo Group Web Analytics Association Website (WAA). We encourage you to become a member of WAA, as they provide great webinars and other resources for all its members. While all of the above resources are focused on general web analytics we also invite you to follow the Avangate Software Business Blog, where we will do our best to offer you specialized resources for software vendors. 43

44 12. Great Books to Read There are 3 books we highly recommend: The first one is Web Analytics One hour a day and Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik, which are a great intro in the Web Analytics World. After reading his books, you will be half way there when talking about mastering web analytics. The other half will come from the experience you will gain while testing and acting on the data you get. While these 2 books will help you really understand what s with all that data you get from your analytics tool, Bryan Eisenberg from Grokdotcom will help you take some actions and make those sales hit the roof. And as one can never be 100% sure of the action he takes, he recommends to Always Be Testing. 44

45 Did you find this ebook useful? If you enjoyed reading this ebook, please take a few moments to give us feedback. We respect and value your opinion. Can you think of any ways to improve it? Are there any other subjects you would like us to approach? Please send us feedback! 45

46 About Avangate Avangate provides solutions for electronic software distribution and reseller management, assisting software companies worldwide in successfully selling their products online and managing a distribution network. The company s offer includes an ecommerce platform incorporating an easy to use and secure online payment system, plus software marketing services and additional marketing and sales tools such as an affiliate network, automated cross selling options, software promotion management, real time reporting, 24/7 shopper support, and the ARMS reseller management program specifically designed for software sales. More information can be found on the corporate website, at Avangate Van Heuven Goedhartlaan 937, 1181 LD Amstelveen, The Netherlands Tel: Fax: info@avangate.com Web: of GECAD Group, delivering innovative IT solutions Worldwide since