Ten Supplementary Analyses to Improve E-commerce Web Sites

Typical web analytic packages provide basic key performance indicators and standard reports to help assess traffic patterns on the website, evaluate site performance, and identify potential problems such as bad links resulting in page not found errors. Based on our experience in mining data for multiple retail e-commerce sites, we offer several recommendations for supplementary analyses that we have found to be very useful in practice. These include analysis of human vs. bot traffic, univariate data, session timeouts, form errors, micro-conversions, search, real estate usage, product affinities (associations), migrators, and geographical data. Several of these advanced analyses are based on the construction of a customer signature, which in turn benefits from additional overlays, such as third-party demographic attributes. We describe the construction of such a signature and the challenges faced by businesses attempting to construct it.