Archive for December, 2009

How To Use Day Parting To Trim Wasteful Spend In AdWords

December 30th, 2009

Simple logic would dictate that if someone searched for your keywords, show them an ad. Sometimes hard facts are completely different from what you would expect. In most AdWords accounts that I have dealt with, I have seen much lower conversion rates and revenue in between the hours of 2AM and 7AM. Here’s how to check if this is the case on your eCommerce site with Google Analytics.

How Do I Check?

In Google Analytics, go to Ecommerce –> Conversion Rate. Select a 3 month date range, last 90 days is the best. The click on the little clock icon where it says “Graph By”. This will segment your conversion rate for the last 90 days by hour of the day. You should see two charts like this sample below.

Conversion Rate By Hour, Click To Enlarge

Conversion Rate By Hour, Click To Enlarge

If your chart is anything like this one, you will see that specific hours of the day perform better than others. This means that your cost per acquisition will likely be higher during those times.

What Do I Do?

There are two possible solutions to help minimize wasteful spend during these hours.

Option A — Lower Bids

The first basic option, is to lower your bids in each campaign during these hours. You can do this by going to Campaign Settings –> Advanced Settings –>Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling. It will pop up a window where you can set hours and percentages of your regular bids. (Click on Mode: Bid adjustment.)

Option B –Pause Ads

The second basic option, is to pause your campaigns automatically during these hours. You can do this by going to Campaign Settings –> Advanced Settings –>Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling. It will pop up a window where you can set which hours you would like your ads to run. (Click on Mode: Basic.)

Bottom Line

Make sure that you are getting the most out of your advertising spend. Every little trick can help. Another thing you can do is to set your campaigns to use Accelerated Ad Delivery to display your ad every time someone searches for your keywords during the correct hours.

No comments »

Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Tracking & Analytics

Tags:

4 Quick Tips On How To Boost Magento’s Speed

December 10th, 2009

3380560365_e007c91946[1]

Magento is a great open source eCommerce platform. Merchants love it for it’s full feature set as well as it’s ability to add-on features via extensions. One issue that a lot of people run into is the page load speed. Magento is very picky about the server set up. Here are some tips to help boost the performance and speed of your Magento store.

1 — Query Cache Size

Change the default Query Cache Size, it should be 32 or 64mb.

Magento Blog: Modify the configuration for your MySQL server to take better advantage of your server’s RAM. Most Linux distributions provide a conservative MySQL package out of the box to ensure it will run on a wide array of hardware configurations. If you have ample RAM (eg, 1gb or more), then you may want to try tweaking the configuration. An example my.cnf is below, though you will want to consult the MySQL documentation for a complete list of configuration directives and recommended settings.

Example my.cnf:

example_cnf

2 — Disable Access Time Logging

Magento Wiki: For Linux servers, if you have access-time logging enabled on any of your mysql, web server or cache partitions, try turning it off for a performance boost. If you’re using ext3 or reiserfs there may be faster journal write methods you can use. For more information see Linux.com.

3 — Enable KeepAlives in Apache

Make sure your Apache configuration has KeepAlives enabled. KeepAlives are a trick where multiple HTTP requests can be funneled through a single TCP connection. Since the setup of each TCP connection incurs additional time, this can significantly reduce the time it takes to download all the files (HTML, JavaScript, images) for a website. More information at Apache.org.

4 — Memory Based File Systems

Are you using a memory-based filesystem such as tmpfs? This helps Magento move faster because of all the reads/writes.

Use a memory-based filesystem for Magento’s var directory. Magento makes extensive use of file-based storage for caching and session storage. The slowest component in a server is the hard drive, so if you use a memory-based filesystem such as tmpfs, you can save all those extra disk IO cycles by storing these temporary files in memory instead of storing them on your slow hard drive.

For more in depth tips on how to boost performance on Magento, see the Magento Blog.

Image Credit: Viernest

4 comments »

Posted in Platform

Tags:

How To Track Magento eCommerce Sales In Google Anayltics

December 9th, 2009

In a previous post we covered how to set up 3rd party tracking pixels in Magento. Setting up Google Analytics eCommerce tracking is much easier. There are two steps to this process:

Magento Configuration

In Magento, navigate to System –> Configuration –> Google API –> Google Analytics. Select “Enabled” and enter your Google Analytics account number. (The account number can be found when you login to Google Analytics on the main page, right next to the site URL.

Magento-Google-Analytics

Google Analytics Configuration

In Google Analytics, navigate to Analytics Settings –> Profile Settings –> Main Website Profile Information. Set “eCommerce Website” to “Yes, an E-Commerce Site”. This will track orders, total order amount, products ordered and quantity. It will also allow you to break down revenue by geographic location.

Google-Analytics-eCommerce-Tracking

Bottom Line

eCommerce Tracking is very simple to set up in Magento. You may as well take advantage of it.

Read how to track eCommerce sales in Google Analytics on other platforms. You can also track Site Search behavior in Google Analytics.

No comments »

Posted in E-Commerce, Tracking & Analytics

Tags:

How To Setup Conversion Tracking In Magento

December 2nd, 2009

3rd Party Conversion Tracking

Magento Commerce has the ability to track eCommerce sale with Google Analytics out of the box (more on that in a future post). Something that a lot of merchants struggle with is how to set up conversion tracking for other tracking software or comparison shopping engines.

ConversionTracking

How To

Here is an easy hack to track conversions for Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and the likes:

Open the file: app\design\frontend\XXXX\XXXX\template\checkout\success.phtml

At the end of the file, add the following code, this will create two variables with the order number and the order total:

<?php
	//Get Order Number & Order Total
	$order = Mage::getModel('sales/order')->loadByIncrementId(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getLastRealOrderId());
	$amount = number_format($order->getGrandTotal(),2);
?>

After the above code snippet, copy and paste the tracking code from the third party analytics software of comparison shopping engine. Insert the following variable where they suggest placing the order ID and the order total:

<?php echo $amount; ?> // Order Total
<?php echo $this->getOrderId() ?> // Order Number

Here is a code example for the Shopzilla conversion tracking tool:

<script language="javascript">
	var mid            = 'XXXXX'; // Your Shopzilla Merchant ID
	var cust_type      = '';
	var order_value    = '<?php echo $amount; ?>'; // Order Amount
	var order_id       = '<?php echo $this->getOrderId() ?>'; //Order Number
	var units_ordered  = '';
</script>
<script language="javascript" src="https://www.shopzilla.com/css/roi_tracker.js"></script>
<script language="JavaScript" src="https://eval.bizrate.com/js/pos_193511.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Image Credit: Search Engine Journal

6 comments »

Posted in Platform, Tracking & Analytics

Tags: