OK, so over the last couple of years, I’ve been asked many times what our clients can do to further optimise their ChannelAdvisor Stores, their eBay Stores and listings, and alas their existing ecommerce websites and blogs. Not a bad question, but there was a catch.. they all wanted this for FREE.

I found myself giving out the same websites and useful tools over and over, and realised there wasn’t an up-to-date reasonable list out there to suit this purpose, so decided I’d start one here…

What is it?
“A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!”

OK, so why would I use it?
I like this site as it’s very fast at giving you an overall “popularity” view of any site according to a whole host of different sites. This is great to find out how your site performs against your competitors too!

Overall Rating: 9/10

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What is it?
“SnapShots are smart profiles of the websites we visit. Simply enter a domain (e.g. amazon.com) and SnapShot will provide traffic history, a trust assessment and a list of all available coupon codes.”

OK, so why would I use it?
A product from Bill Gross (founder of GoTo search engine, which then became Overture, created paid search and was acquired by Yahoo), which allows for an ‘alexa-like’ experience of site ranking and traffic data for both single sites and site comparison (again good for competitor analysis).

They also have a couple other features thrown in which I like:

First, it shows ‘Deals’ that a site may be offering. (Coupon Mountain who specializes in finding and collecting promotion codes and they gather the majority of deals available every day)

Second, it shows a ‘Trust’ element for websites, which is based on community trends and third party secutity services.

Overall Rating: 7/10

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What is it?
“Website benchmarking is a score of your website’s performance within a large range of tests. The EC-Plus website benchmarking test is a free online website benchmark utility that allows anyone to quickly assess the performance of their website, without extensive knowledge of website development.”

OK, so why would I use it?

If you’re looking at taking out some form of SEO service, I’d recommend checking this out first to find out; whether you need it; what areas your current site(s) are falling down on.

The report is very detailed and will give you a good indicator of website strengths and weaknesses, and of course again it’s very useful to find out whether a competitors site scores higher than your own (i.e., if a competitor uses the same shopping cart software, and they’ve taken an SEO package to gain traffic, you could test to see whether it has made a difference..)

Overall Rating: 8/10

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What is it?
“A sitemap is a data file which references pages of your website, and assists search engines in indexing / storing your pages in their databases faster and more easily. By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.”

OK, so why would I use it?This is a great site, very fast to use, and of course totally free. I would recommend you invest 3 minutes in getting this done and dusted! Totally automated and makes creating a sitemap almost too easy.

Overall Rating: 10/10

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What is it?
“The Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Start your search by entering your own keyword phrases or a specific URL”

OK, so why would I use it?
A fantastic tool from Google that allows you to find relevant, high traffic keywords and key phrases for.. well, any form of online advertising, oh and of course maybe your Adwords campaigns?

Overall Rating: 9/10

OK, so it looks like Google are to roll out some new features and functionality to their superb Google Analytics package (free of charge for all you folks that haven’t currently implemented this with your CA Stores or stand-alone Websites).

Over the next several weeks Google are set to migrate all accounts to the new interface, so worry not if your account looks no different.


OK, so onto the features..


Customizable Dashboard

so one of the major features - in my eyes anyway - is the option to customize your dashboard (with drag & drop functionality). Every time I use G.A, I find myself viewing the same key data reports, no matter what the site, and even though it’s not exactly difficult to navigate to these different areas, I did often ask why the reports couldn’t be customized and saved for future use (or even assigned to a particular user).

This minor update is a win for me, and will save time not only finding relevant data, but will also allow me to see correlation between the data more easily. *thumbs up



Trend and Date Slider

I quite like the new feature which allows you to visually highlight specific areas in your data to spot trends and key data areas.



Email Reports

A handy little feature here which allows you to automatically send detailed information in different formats (PDF, XML & CSV) from your new “personalised dashboard” *minor celebration*. Even though I haven’t yet tested this yet it will save a couple clicks a day that’s for sure.



Geo Targeting

If you’re running location specific campaigns the new visual functionality will again help to find out what works and what doesn’t per location. Giving you both information on who, how, where, when and the value for each visitor too.

There are more features, and you can find these using the links below.


Personally I think G.A should introduce some ‘best practice’ reports, which help the basic user find the vitals and put them to use, as this is something I’m asked for advice on quite often. A tutorials / open workshop area would be a great move.

Anyhoo, overall some great new features which i’m itching to get my hands on.. roll on the roll out!

More Info:

Google Analytics - Video Overview

Google Analytics - New Features

Also be sure to subscribe to the Google Analytics blog, for all things analytics.. http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-version-of-google-analytics.html

Matt Cutts, A Google employee currently heading up Google’s WebSpam team, has recently posted a good article on Google Analytics, giving you a sample of the depth of information you can access using this free web based service from Google.

This data is interesting to look at for sure, but for those of you who run an e-commerce business, knowing your statistics (top keywords, referring URLs, traffic trends, etc) can help you to save time and money. For example, Google Adwords is implemented within Google Analytics, so finding what your top keywords based on your site data, and implementing these into your Google Adwords campaigns in order to increase performance is a much more straight forward process.

You could also use the information to assist making business decisions like choosing products, targeting customers & increasing the performance of your marketing campaigns - all based on real life accurate data from you own site(s).

Google Analytics is also integrated into ChannelAdvisor Merchant, a well known and widely used multi-marketplace e-commerce platform, allowing businesses to sell product to marketplaces like eBay, amazon, yahoo, as well as a whole host of Shopping Comparison Sites like Kelkoo, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com & Google Base to name but a few.

This powerful web based application, along side Google Base & their Web Developer Tools suggests a hint at Google’s direction for 2007, and baring in mind the last three or four Google Acquisitions (which include Jotspot {A wiki with a number of collaborative tools for business users, and includes applications such as spreadsheets, calendars, and forms}, writely {Web-based word processing that allows online document collaboration}, and of course YouTube {A community driven social networking site, allowing users to upload, share & broadcast videos, which is now one of the busiest destinations on the web}), I’m very excited to see how these platforms, ideas and technologies will interact with each other as future development rolls out.

What other areas would you like to see Google tackle, and what other kinds of application could they offer to assist e-commerce traders?

Mic Burns
Frooition Support

Incase you haven’t yet heard, Google & Yahoo have launched a collaborative site www.sitemaps.org. Sitemaps provide webmasters and content providers to submit new and existing content to search engines. Unified

As any webmaster will know, publishing content to multiple search engines can be a somewhat tedious task, so this unified approach will bring a new standard, and a more efficient approach to submitting your website(s), and the search engine industry as a whole.

Just because a level playing field has been agreed in the form of www.sitemaps.org, don’t expect to see the exact same result rankings when searching Yahoo or Google, as each of these companies still have their own search algorhythms and ranking criteria. However, submitting content to all Search engines that subscribe to this new standard will now have a common ground, making it both easier for publishers and for search engines to crawl and update your site.

Both google and Yahoo will continue to crawl websites and index using their own bots (slurp(yahoo) and googlebot(need I say it?)), but each engine will also use the sitemap submissions to assist this process.

Rumour has it Microsoft (MSN) has also accepted an invitation to support the new project, which now brings together the three big players in the search industry.

Links: www.sitemaps.org
Create a sitemap: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
Submit your sitemap to Google: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps
Submit your sitemap to Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

I hear on the grapevine eBay are working on a few additions to the standard search functionality, and they’re calling it ‘Best Match’.

This had a short release earlier this week for testing, and has now been removed again as far as I can tell. The below picture shows how it would have looked:

Basically this feature allows for potential buyers to search against key factors, like best performing item based on hits, price, and a whole other list of factors.. Ultimately pushing for relevancy (I’m sure you all know the feeling of searching for an iPod and finding nothing but accessories?)

For anyone interested in seeing this and other eBay features in action, go view this video demo from Eric Billingsley, courtesy of The ScobleShow, you can see it here!

Also, I would recommend subscribing to the ScobleShow podcast if you’re interested in anything from new start up web based technology companies, right through to Sun Microsystems server technologies… lots of good info.

This update is based on eBay.com for the moment, but I should imagine if it’s a successful release it will not take too long to role out to the UK.
To note: The additional search option will be made optional, so will not impose such a threat to the core site.