Depending on the platform you are using for your website, it may come with its own analytics tool.  This tool provides you with a summary of crucial data collected to help you track your website’s performance and the success of your Internet marketing campaigns.

Why do you need to measure your website’s success?

Maintaining a website is like managing a business:  You don’t stop at merely running it.  To get the best results from running your business, you need to continually improve it.

And it all starts with measuring.  By measuring the performance of your website, you will know if your efforts in building and optimising your website have paid off.  In addition, it will clue you in on what else needs fixing or updating.

This blog post explains the three phases your website should go through regularly after about a month post-launch.

What you need to measure

Zest

Order report – This allows you to compare the number of orders received each month.

Item report – Tells you which items are selling the most and making the most revenue through.

Visitor report – Tells you how effective your marketing efforts are.  It shows how many visitors your website is receiving.  It provides you a compariso of your traffic over time and insights to seasonal trends.  Visitor reports also show where the traffic is from and your visitors’ activities on your website.

Learn more about Zest reports on the Reports page.

WordPress

WordPress doesn’t come with its own analytics tool.  However, you can have an analytics plugin installed on your WordPress website.  Contact our support team to request for a plugin.

Shopify

Channel Overview – Lets you see how specific sales channels are performing.  This can be accessed on the Overview page.

Product Sales Reports – This is available for those on the professional plan or higher.  This allows you to access more detailed reports about your products sales from the Reports page of your Shopify admin dashboard.

It is important that you understand the assumptions for the data you see in the Product Sales reports:

• Reports are based on the date of orders
• They show gross sales, but do not include sales from test orders.
• They don’t include canceled or deleted orders.
• They don’t include refunds, discounts, shipping, taxes, quanityt breaks, etc.

Order sales reports – This is only available on the professional plan or higher plans.  Order sales reports give you information on orders made on your website based on different criteria, such as by month, by channel, by staff, etc.

Payments reports – This is only available on the professional plan or higher plans.  Payment reports show you information on captured payments from customers.  There are two types of payment reports in this section:  Payments by payment method, and payments by channel.

Tax reports – This is only available on the professional plan or higher plans.  This shows reports on the total taxes charged by region.

Insights reports – This tool can help you understand your customers’ shopping behaviour.  You can use this as a guide fro building marketing campaigns and strategies based on the reports generated in this section.

Traffic reports – This is only available on the professional plan or higher plans.  This lets you see information on how many visitors you get, where they are accessing your ecommerce site (mobile or desktop), where they are located, and what pages in your store they initially land on.

Learn more about Shopify reports in Reports and analytics.

Squarespace

Cover page

This section gives you insights on the visitor traffic to your landing page.

Traffic overview – Offers you a general insight on visitor traffic, including page views, visits, and traffic size.

Mobile Usage – Provides insights on browsing trends by device and operating system.

Referrers – Lets you see where visitors are coming from when they visit your website.

Search Engine Queries – Shows you the keywords used to reach your page.

Activity log – A searchable log of all times a visitor accessed your cover page in the past seven days.

Website

This section shows you insights on engagement, content, and general visitor behaviour on your website.

Traffic overview – Offers you a general insight on visitor traffic, including page views, visits, and traffic size.

Mobile Usage – Provides insights on browsing trends by device and operating system.

RSS Subscribers – Provides you an estimation of your total RSS subscriber by feed.

Referrers – Shows you where your visitors are coming from.

Popular content – Shows you the most popular content on your website based on page views.  

Site search queries – Shows you what your visitors are searching on your site by keyword

Search Engine Queries – Shows you the keywords used to reach your page.

NOTE:  The Sales Overview reports are only available for Squarespace Commerce sites.  As Stripe, Squarespace Commerce’s only integrated payment processor, is currently not supported in New Zealand, Zeald does not offer ecommerce packages for Squarespace.  Find out more here.

Learn more about Squarespace reports in Squarespace Metrics FAQ.

Why does my Google Analytics and my own analytics tool show different numbers?

Different analytics products may use a variety of methods to collect data about your traffic, so it’s normal to see discrepancies between reports created using different products.  For more details, see How come Google Analytics shows different numbers from my reports.