Advanced statistics go above and beyond the general statistics to tracking revenue, advertising campaigns, and trends. These statistics are usually used by ecommerce sites that are more than just an online business card. The following are some of the statistics generated in the advanced web analytics packages:
- Revenue Tracking - Tracks actual sales and reports on them along with the general statistics
- Campaign Tracking - Tracks and monitors the performance of an advertising campaign
- Conversion Tracking - Tracks conversions other than sales such as sign ups for a newsletter or service
- Time Trends - Tracks trends over time such as Day of Week or Time of Day, usually along with revenues
- Click Paths - Tracks in realtime the visitors on your site and the path they take through your site
Revenue tracking is the basis for advanced statistics. It enables you to get invaluable insight into your website activity that you just cannot get out of basic statistics.
Revenue tracking is simply tracking each order or sale (transaction) that occurs on your website and attaching that information to the visitor. Then your statistics reports can show you the revenue alongside the pageviews and visits. Your referrers report will not only show you how many visitors came to your site from that referrer, but how many of these visitors actually made purchases, and even better, how much they spent. Similarly, these reports show the effectiveness of search phrases and the related purchases.
Let's go back to the RoboMaid 3000 example in the Referrers and Search Phrases section under General Statistics. In that example, we found out that the search phrases that you were spending your advertising budget on, "walking robots", were not drawing people to your site, so you changed your advertising to match what your visitors were looking for, "robotic house cleaner". Now, with the new reports that show revenue, you find out that while you may get a lot more traffic to your site, the visitors that are actually purchasing are searching for "walking robots!" In actuality, the search phrases that you were getting less traffic from are in fact generating a lot more revenue. It might be time to switch your advertising focus again to reflect this.
Campaign Tracking
Campaign tracking is one of the most important features for a site doing any kind of advertising or marketing campaigns. The campaign reports will let you see your Return on Investment (ROI) with regards to what you spent on the campaign. Another benefit of campaign tracking over the referrer tracking alone is that if you are advertising on a service that has several partners, you can see reports on the campaign across all of the partners. Let's say you were advertising on Overture, most of the people that click on your Overture keyword campaign would not even come from Overture.com, they would actually come from its partners like MSN or Yahoo. So in your Referrers Report, this visitor would show up as coming from MSN or Yahoo, but since you are using a campaign, you also know that it was because of your advertising on Overture. This may sound very confusing, but rest assured, campaign tracking should take the guesswork out of your advertising.