Hello

I am very new to online stores. I have the standard urchin 5 and plan to move up to urchin6 when it is available again. There is a lot of information there, too much I fear.

As a store owner, what statistics do you find most beneficial? What do you look for when you only have a few minutes? Why?

Any insights would be appreciated
Steven

Hey Steven.
Every business will consider or track very different things as a measure of success or importance.
Personally (with only a few minutes as you've asked), I look at:
-Uniques
-Page view
-Length of visit*
-Search terms
-Conversions (as it relates to carts started, and visits)

Length of visit is of particular importance to me (along where the visit was spent)...it's important (depending on your site) to keep it as "sticky" (as valuable and worth visiting and re-visiting--regardless of purchase motivation) to a visitor as possible.

Hope this helps...you ask great questions.

Thanks for the help. When I get to the statistics site, its almost overwhelming. It could take half a day to go through everything. I know they are providing information for all types of people, and there is more to it than just looking at sales totals. Being new to online sales, its a bit hard to know what to work on first.

Thanks again
Steven

Hey Steven,

Do yourself a big favor and get Statcounter.com It's FREE, and amazing. It's WAY better than the Urchin Stats that come with your store. First off, it's all in real-time so you don't have to wait 24hrs to check your current stats, plus it can do all kinds of stuff like, check browser types, resolutions, visitor paths(way more accurate than Urchin) visit lengths, referring url's and everything else you can think of.

And best of all the layout is so much easier to navigate. It won' take you a half a day to go through and get a good read of what's going on. Trust me, I've been using this counter for a few months now, and I LOVE IT.

Good Day.

I've used a few different stats programs and have seen the range from easy to use and simple TO inflated with information (over)abundance and complex.

Urchin 5, as I've mentioned in other threads is on the abundant end of things, very thorough, but not extremely difficult to get used to.

Urchin 6 / Google Analytics is not only free but also easy to use. It does not have ALL of the information that v5 had, but it's interface is logical and the information is centered around promotion of your site, marketing, PPC vs. Organic. It is less about the raw numbers and more about effectiveness.

Other programs, www.statscounter.com, www.sitemeter.com and others have worked well too, though my experience with them is limited. Be aware that most of these products work by adding code to your site (in IMG or JS form) and that you want to make sure that you add the secure (httpS) version of the code or it may cause security warnings in the checkout pages.