Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
This approach is all good and fine if you are working with a manageable amount
of orders on a daily basis, but it is completely unusable if you have thousands or even
just hundreds of orders on a daily basis. For large numbers of sales, you can automate
the order reconciliation process through the Yahoo! Web analytics api.
Application Programming Interface (API)
An API is a set of functions that a service, such as Yahoo! Web Analytics, provides to support
requests made by other applications.
i will go more in depth about the api in appendix a.
Tracking Products Purchased
The final step in any funnel and the climax of our merchandising expectations is the
ability to track products purchased. This is not to be confused with the ability to track
a sale as whole, as that only records the fact that we had a sale and what the amount
was, but beyond the fact that a conversion took place and that it had a value, we don't
know much.
so after tracking product added to cart and potentially a pending sale, we
move on to tracking in detail which products your visitors purchased.
There are a plethora of positive reasons for wanting to do detailed merchandis-
ing tracking. and should you be completely out of ideas, let me suggest at least one
value before moving into the nuts and bolts of how to use your tracking reports in
part ii of this topic.
Most online marketers understand that click-through rate (cTr) is not neces-
sarily the best way to measure success. To some degree, when looking at your cTr
metric, all you see is the match between, for example, search phrase and the search
advertising creative, which is important but does not define success in the end. i am
sure you can imagine us driving up the cTr by adding in a sentence saying “click
here to get a $500 discount,” but if the offering does not match that, the cTr didn't
do anything for you.
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Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online campaign. It is calculated by dividing the
number of visitors who clicked on the campaign ad by the number of times the campaign ad
was delivered (impressions). For example, if a banner ad was delivered 1,000 times (impressions
delivered) and 15 visitors clicked on it, then the resulting CTR would be 1.5 percent.
