Webshoptimizer

Last week Richardo Dacosta asked me a very interesting question:

Your contribution prevents the spiders from reading the osCsid. Would I be able to use it to prevent spiders from seeing lets say: “ref=53&affiliate_banner_id=16″ from my affiliates? if so, what do I have to do to make it work?

In my last days to my wedding, it got me thinking and finding (another) quick and dirty solution, to redirect search engines to the right URL without the affiliate references. This way links from affiliate websites add up to your original (product) page!

Read on: Canonical contribution Affiliate edition

Yesterday I launched my quick and dirty proof of concept for the implementation of the “canonical urls” link tag. Now I gathered some more information, tidied up the code and released it as a contribution. Always a great moment.
Grab the contribution here: Canonical URL link Install instructions for the canonical URL links

If you have your own shop, you are on top of numbers. In order to serve your customers better you give them as much as you possibly can in terms like service, product information and product suggestions. Since the most valuable numbers can be collected in Google Analytics (like amount of visitors, keywords and general e-commerce tracking) this contribution adds even more valuable information to Analytics.

Collect what your visitors search for
To spot trends early it’s a good idea to track the search queries of your visitors. This allows you to catch misspellings or related items with an high demand. With this information you can e.g. put common misspellings in the description of an item or start selling related products to items you already sell.

A few contributions already allowed you to track search queries, but most of them collected them in the administrator panel. To keep the administrator as clean as possible, you want to collect information in a environment capable and designed for tracking information. Google Analytics suits this job. Therefor you can find your visitors search queries from your shop back in your Analytics account.

How does it work? Read on!

To make it somewhat easier for your customers to complete an order, we skip one step straight to the registration form. With this very easy modification you will have your customers faster to the goal where you want them the most: a complete order from a new happy customer.

With this modification you leave out the “Welcome, please sign in” page. If you have 99,9% new customers (like most of my webshops) ordering in from your shop, you can imagine that the “please sign in” step is pretty redundant. With this page left out customers can complete their order faster, without the nagging “please sign in” page. This makes your web shop slightly more user friendly and the funnel to your goal shorter.

Don’t worry: returning customers can still login to their account using the “login” reference at the top of the registration form or “My Account” button top right. installation of the contribution is easy…

I want to say “obrigado” to Marcello Eduardo for translating the Google Analytics Beta Tracking contribution in Portugese. Thanks a lot!
You can get the contribution here: Google Analytics Beta Transaction tracking

Translations are welcome. Anyone prefer a Dutch translation?

Off-topic: yes, I am gonna write some more posts in the near future. I promise.

Today, PhoenixMedien released some bug fixes for “Google Analytics (beta) with E-commerce” contribution. This allows you to track your transactions with Google Analytics Beta statistics.

The following fixes are included:

- add_slashes() to allow quotes in product and category name
- number_format() don’t uses comma as thousands separator
- simplified installation in footer.php for ecommerce tracking

Get the new contribution: Google Analytics (beta) with E-commerce

I was aware of those nasty bugs (easy to say), but did’nt have the time yet to fix them (shame on me). Thank you a lot PhoenixMedien!

If you have problems with the contribution, feel free to contact me.