Understanding who is coming to your web site, where they come from, and what they do when they are there are all important parts of measuring your success in online commerce. As with any investment you make in your business, you need a way of measuring its benefit to the company. Additionally, when you run campaigns you also need a way of accurately measuring the affects of such marketing. In the world of connected commerce, you need to rely on web site statistic and analytic tools.

These tools will give you information about many aspects of the traffic flowing through your web site. Generally you will see a lot of detailed information such as:

• What state or country the visitor originates from
• How many times that visitor has returned to your site
• How long were they on your site and what pages did they look at during that time
• When they entered your site, how did they find you
• If they used a search engine to find you, what keyword or phrase did they use
• When they left your site, where did they go next
• What kind of computer and web browser are they using

All of these details may be interesting in themselves, but the real power is putting them together and performing analysis on them. This allows you to see a history of your efforts and even forecast future trends with accuracy. Instead of blindly offering a web site to the public, these analytical tools allow you to refine your site and respond on a daily basis to increase traffic and even purchases.

A popular analytic tool that many web sites use is Google Analytics. This is a free service from Google and will do a good job in reporting everything you need to know about your site. Follow this link to watch a video describing all you need to know about Google Analytics:

http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html

SellingPoint deeply integrates with Google Analytics. This will give you a very nice view of your sites activity. And since both SellingPoint and Google Analytics allow you to keep sites separate, if you have multiple SellingPoint sites, you’ll be able to get a great breakdown on each site individually. Now you can track your store for architects, contractors, dealers, consumers, and others independently.

To integrate Google Analytics into a SellingPoint site, follow these steps:

1. From SellingPoint Management Studio, click the Exchange Accounts button on the Home tab of the ribbon
2. Locate and double click on the site in the tree view that you want to link to Google Analytics
3. Click the More Settings button
4. Select the Statistics tab
5. Under the Analytics section, change the analysis program to Google Analytics
6. Paste the tracking code you received from Google when you created a Google Analytics account
7. Click OK to save the changes and then click OK twice more to go back to the main program screen
8. You may now click on the Marketing navigation tab and then select the account you just modified in order to see the Google Analytics results directly within SellingPoint

Note that Google may ask you to log in, in which case you simply enter your Google email and password that were used to setup your Google Analytics account. Remember that it takes a little time to aggregate the results and perform an analysis on them. You should allow up to 24 hours for data to start appearing in the reports.

For an overview of some of the more popular tools for tracking activity in SellingPoint, take a look at this video demonstration.