Yahoo! Web Analytics: New Look, More Reports, Enhanced Features

Have you checked your Yahoo! Web Analytics reports this week? If so, you may have noticed some improvements and enhancements to the Yahoo! Web Analytics reporting interface, along with new demographics and interest groups reports, segmentation, and filters; a demographics and interest groups dashboard; the ability to create more scheduled reports; and the addition of custom fields along with a greater number of actions (more on that in a bit).

New Yahoo! Web Analytics reports, segmentation, and filters

How well do you know your site visitors? Probably not as well as you’re about to. Now you can get even closer to your current and potential customers, with more detailed demographics and interest group reporting. Next time you’re using Yahoo! Web Analytics, remember to check out these reports, most of which are also included in the new demographics dashboard:

• Age report – breaks down the age of visitors to your site in the following categories: under 17, 18-34, 35-54, and 55+.
• Gender report – breaks down the gender of visitors to your site as male, female, or unknown.
• Age & Gender report – contains cross-tabbed age and gender information (e.g., 18-34 female).
• Interest Categories report – shows the top interest categories of your site visitors.
• Y! Properties of Interest report – shows the top 20 Yahoo! properties also visited by your site visitors.

Yahoo! Web Analytics demographics dashboard

You can also apply age, gender, interest categories, and Y! properties of interest segmentation and cross-reference filtering to your reports. This information can help you with demographic targeting of Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns on search or content networks, and of AdWords campaigns on content networks. Learn about report segmentation and cross-reference filters.

More scheduled reports

Previously, you could schedule up to three reports to be delivered via email or FTP on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. As of this week, you can create up to 10 scheduled reports to better help you keep tabs on your site activity, and to help you with planning promotions or fine-tuning marketing campaigns. For example, if you evaluate your search campaigns and campaign spend once a week – say, every Tuesday – you may want a report delivered every Monday of top performing campaigns for the previous week.

Get into the action(s), and introducing custom fields

When Yahoo! Web Analytics was first released for Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store accounts, you could define up to nine custom actions to manually include in your site tracking. With this latest release, you may now define up to 50 actions. Learn how to define and track actions.

We also offer limited support for creating and tracking up to 38 custom fields. You can use custom fields to add specific reporting categories to the reporting structures already available in the system. Merchants should note that custom fields require manual setup and page tagging. We’ll soon be providing a Merchant Solutions-specific help page where you can learn more about custom fields and how to integrate them.

Digging into your data

The information available in your analytics reports can play a major role in helping you increase your store’s sales and revenue, along with the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. If you’re not sure where to begin, or if you’ve enabled Yahoo! Web Analytics and are looking for help and training materials, there are several resources available to you:

• Our online help center offers a number of help articles that take you through enabling Yahoo! Web Analytics for your store, customizing tracking code, using key reports and features, and common troubleshooting questions.

• MarketMotive offers a free 30-minute video showing you “4 Quick Ways to Improve Your Store,” using information from your analytics reports. This video tutorial is part of a full Yahoo! Web Analytics course, which covers important topics such as actionable reports, key performance indicators (KPIs), segmentation ideas, campaign configuration, custom reports, and more.

  
  MarketMotive’s free Yahoo! Web Analytics training video

  The complete course is available for $199, and MarketMotive is offering a 10% discount to the first 2,100 merchants who register using coupon code YMRK3YWTEN. Find out more about MarketMotive’s Yahoo! Web Analytics training.

• For merchants interested in Yahoo! Web Analytics consultations, several Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer partners offer consulting services. For a list of these developers, please see our Yahoo! Web Analytics training and consulting page.

If you’re a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant and haven’t yet enabled Yahoo! Web Analytics for your store, we strongly encourage you to do so. The information in your reports can provide you with important knowledge and insights that are key to your store’s success.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Free OneTwoPunch webinar: International SEO techniques, live site review, and more!

On Wednesday, April 22, from 2-3 p.m. EDT, join Eric Yonge of EYStudios and Scott Smigler of Exclusive Concepts as they host the next OneTwoPunch live webinar. Learn about international search engine optimization techniques, watch a live site review of home storage and organization products store SpaceSavers.com, and check out some new Yahoo! Store innovations from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer partner KingWebmaster.

This webinar is free. Register now.

Extending the Life of Single-Use Coupons

Since the release of our single-use coupons feature at the end of February, coupon series expiration has been a popular question. If you haven’t seen answers to some of the blog comments, or if you haven’t yet visited our help page to learn more about coupon series expiration, this post may help answer some of your questions about how to extend the life of a single-use coupon series past six months, and why limited-time coupons can be better for your store’s sales and revenue.

Changing the expiration date

If you’re using single-use coupons, you’ve likely noticed that when you create a coupon series, you must set an expiration date up to a maximum of six months into the future. So if you created a single-use coupon series today (April 3), you could set an expiration date for any date up until October 2 of this year. Thinking ahead, some of you have asked the very valid question, "What if I want the coupons to be good for a longer amount of time?"

As you approach a coupon series expiration date, you can edit the series to extend its lifespan. Each time you edit a coupon series, you can extend the expiration date up to six months from that day (the edit date), to a maximum of one year (365 days) from the date the series was created. You can edit this date as many times as you wish until you reach that one-year maximum. All that’s a bit of a mouthful, so here’s an example:

• April 3, 2009 — I create a single-use coupon series, good until October 2, 2009.
• On August 15, 2009, I decide that I want the coupon instances in this series to be valid for a longer amount of time. I locate the coupon series in Coupon Manager, and edit its expiration date. Since I’m editing the coupon series on August 15, I can extend the expiration date to any future date up until February 14, 2010, which is six months away.
• On February 1, 2010, I once again decide that I want this coupon series to stick around for a couple more months. When I edit the coupon series this time, I can extend its expiration date until April 2, 2010, which is one year from the date the series was created.

One thing to keep in mind is that all coupon instances in a series will inherit the extended expiration date. For step-by-step information about editing a coupon series expiration date, please visit our help page.

Why should I create limited time offers, anyway?

In a word: incentive. When you create a coupon offer, the intent is to drive business. In cases where a coupon offer is extended as a customer service tool or apology, the main intent is to keep a customer’s business rather than have them turn to a competitor. Again, you’d like them to return to your store and to purchase your products. Creating a limited-time offer gives customers more motivation to visit your store within a given timeframe, to remember that they’ve received the coupon offer rather than setting it aside, and ultimately, to redeem the coupon with a purchase. In the current economy, incentive to buy in the immediate future is simply good for business.

If you haven’t yet used the single-use coupons feature, we encourage you to start. Remember, creating different coupon offers as individual series can help you experiment with what works best for enticing customers to buy from your store. The coupon series conversion rate, along with information about associated orders and revenue, can all be found in your Coupon Manager.

If you’re using single-use coupons and have a success story you’d like to share, please leave a comment or send us an email. Your store may be included in a future blog post.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business