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Analytics & Reporting

Store Statistics

Navigate to Reports —> Reporting, from the home page of your admin area.

This page allows you to run a wide variety of real-time reports, all with the convenience of being able to drill down all the way to individual orders or products.

For example, if you would like to view Orders by Year, month and date:

• Click on the year 2007 to view a new report for 2007
• Then, click on January to view all orders for month of January 2007
• Click on the 18th to view all orders for January 18th, 2007
• And finally, you can click to view each individual order for Monday, January 18th 2007.

The power of drill down allows you to validate & trust that your numbers are accurate for the report you are running. All information is real-time, showing 100% live data.

For example, the instant you receive a new order, it will be part of the financial reports, if you include that time period.

How to generate a report:

1. Choose a report
2. Choose a time period (optional)
3. Choose what to group by (usually you will only want to group by one thing at a time)

Chart Format:

You may choose to view your data in either a bar graph, or pie chart by clicking the appropriate icon in the top-right corner of the chart area. The charts only show the first 30 records of your data. So, if your reports returns more than 30 records, you will want to refer to the data grid below the cart for the remaining records.

FAQ

If this report page shows less orders than running a report on the VIEW ALL orders section of the admin area, the discrepancy is due to two reasons.

1. This page uses an INNER JOIN on OrderDetails, which means if your orders have no products on them it will not include that order in the financials.
2. The second reason is that if you do not choose an Order Status for the report on this Financials page, then it automatically excludes Canceled Orders.

ROI Tracking/Ad Campaigns

Navigate to Reports —> ROI Tracking, from the home page of the admin area.

The term ROI stands for Return On Investment. In this case the ROI Tracker allows you to keep track of all your advertising campaigns to keep track of the campaigns that are performing best in terms of total clicks and total sales, as well as the conversion rate.

ROI Tracking & Affiliate System:

The ROI Tracker uses the same exact system as the Affiliate system. This system consists of two tables, Affiliates and Customers. Therefore, on this ROI Tracking page, you will view two columns on the left labeled A and C respectively. You will also see that the ROI Tracker displays both regular Affiliates, as well as Ad campaigns on this page. This helps you to clearly view all advertising channels from one screen. Any clicks that hit your website from your personal advertising, or from your affiliates, you can view it from here.

The Other Campaign:

There one other record on the ROI Tracking page called Other. This record is like a catch-all for clicks. Any clicks that hit your website that are not through a TrackingURL, meaning not from a personal advertising campaign, banner ad or an Affiliate, end up in the Other campaign record. If you click on the link titled Other, you will be able to drill down further and see the actual pages your visitors came from.

Linking From Google Appropriately:

Clicks will only be recognized if you link properly. Lets say, you wanted to track how many customers clicked on your Google Adwords link and at the same time, for the customer to be taken to the home page.

• Create the tracker using the Add button.
• You can name it anything you want as its for your reference. For example, Google Adwords

Once you create the ROI tracker, you will notice that an tracking URL was generated in the following format:

For example, http://www.yourdomain.com/?click=XNote: Click=X (X representing a customer ID number)

So, what you would do is provide Google the link http://www.yourdomain.com/?click=X so that

1. the customer is taken to the homepage
2. the click is tracked into the right campaign

Installing Third-Party Tracking Scripts

How to install ROI Tracking software:

Normally, Return On Investment (ROI) tracking software requires that you place special code on the final page of the checkout process. Here are some variables you can use if your ROI tracking software requires some variables:

• $(CustomerID)
• $(OrderNo)
• $(SubTotal)
• $(ShippingCost)
• $(SalesTax)
• $(GrandTotal)

You may use the above variables in any article on OrderFinished.asp. Therefore, if you go in your admin area to Webmaster -> Website Text and then look in the WEBPAGE column, you can use the above variables in any article that is on the web page OrderFinished.asp.

So, if you have a JavaScript provided by your Statistics / Conversion Tracking provider, paste the JavaScript into the body of article 130, which is reached via Design > Website Text

As mentioned above, if your JavaScript requires some parameters such as the Grand Total amount of the order, you may use the above mentioned variables.

For example, before the article is displayed on the page, it simply replaces the text $(GrandTotal) in your article with the $ amount 74.95.

Custom Reporting Capabilities

Custom reports can be generated in the following three ways:

Report Generator:

• Navigate to Reports -> Reporting, from the home page of your admin area.
• Choose "Custom," in the drop down menu next to "Choose your Report."
• Create your own custom SQL Query in the large text box.
• Select "Generate Report"

Note: Using this feature requires a strong knowledge of SQL programming. You could run any report you wish through this page which will allow you to pull any available information from the Volusion software.

Custom Saved Exports:

• Navigate to Inventory -> Import / Export, from the home page of your admin area.
• Click Data Export
• Choose the Table you wish to export. Now choose the columns to export, and be sure to select a filetype to Export To such as CSV.
• Scroll down to the Export Later section of the page.
• Fill in the field under Save to QueryBank as with a name for your custom export. For example, My Custom Report 1
• Click the Save to QueryBank button. You will be taken to the Saved Exports tab at the top of the page, where you will see your saved export queries, which you can access anytime.
• Now if you would like to really write a CUSTOM SQL QUERY / CUSTOM SQL REPORT you can click on the pencil icon to edit this query. By editing the query you can generate virtually any report you can imagine.

Note: Custom reporting requires a strong knowledge of SQL programming. So, once you have this saved query in your Saved Exports tab you can run it anytime by selecting the query, choosing the export to (i.e. CSV) and clicking the Export my data button on this Saved Exports page. Search, then Save to QueryBank: Let us take the Products table as an example.

• Navigate to Inventory -> Products, from the home page of the admin area
• Click on the Search tab at the top of the page
• Type in the word sony in the Manufacturer field
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Search button
• This will pull up all products with a manufacturer of Sony for example. So the point is that you just created a search on whatever you want, now you want to export this data. So to export the results of your search, do the following:
• Scroll to the right side of the page, above the results you will see Export to QueryBank as with a field to type in a name for your new saved export. Type in My Custom Product Export 1 for example.

Now to access your saved export query anytime, you can go to:

Navigate to Inventory —> Import / Export, from the home page of your admin area

Click the Saved Exports tab at the top of the page Remember that it is saving the query, not the results.

Therefore let us say you add another 25 products made by SONY. Well, if you go to the Saved Exports page and do that one-click export to CSV for example, it is going to pull up the CURRENT list of Sony products in your database. That's the whole power of saved exports!

Search Terms

This table is found by navigating to Reports —> Search Terms within the administration area. This report provides information about the searches conducted with your store using the search box. It tracks the commonly used search terms, how many times they have been used, and last time it was used.

Customer Reviews

This report is found by navigating to Customers —> Customer Reviews

The Customer Reviews section lets you see all the reviews customers have placed about products on your site. You can manage them here, control what reviews are active, filter out any reviews containing profanity, and see how many visitors have rated the review as helpful/not helpful.

Admin History

This table is found by navigating to Customers —> Admin History. This page helps you ensure your administration area is being used by authorized personnel only. It does this by tracking the IP address of the person currently using an admin account. It also tracks the traffic of that admin and displays what pages they are accessing and when it was last accessed.

Accessing Your Site Statistics

1. Go to my.volusion.com and log in with your Volusion account information
   
2. Click Stats on the left side of the page. If only one domain name is assigned to you account, you will be brought directly to SmarterStats. If multiple domains are available, they will be presented as links to access their statistics. The Home Page is the first thing you will see when logging into your site's statistics. SmarterTools has organized some of the most useful metrics into the home page for quick reference. Data displayed is for the last 7 days.

• Views and Visits - The number of page views that have happened on a daily basis along with the total number of visits
• Bandwidth Usage (KB) - The total amount of bandwidth used per day
• Top Pages - The top 10 pages that have been hit on your site in the last 7 days
• Top Referrers - The top 10 sites that referred people to your site. It is not unusual to see your own domain near the top of the list
• Search Engines - The top 5 search engines that referred people to your site
• Top Search Phrases - The top 10 search phrases that referred people to your site

Checking logs via FTP

Log into your FTP account (for more information on how to do this see this article). If you FTP account is set to the home folder of / you should see a few folders when logging in one of them should be labeled Logs. You will find 4 different types of logs in this folder:

• Applogs - These logs contain information about the workings of the back end scripting. Often errors for merchant gateways will be found here.
• 500logs - Tracks browser based activity and errors caused by that activity. You will see records of page timeouts here.
• 404logs - Tracks page not found errors and any URL rewrites our software will make either from 301 redirects or SEO friendly links.
• EmailLogs - Email logs track email traffic sent out from the site.

Abandoned / Live Carts

Navigate to Orders -> Abandoned / Live Carts. Here you have the ability to view Abandoned or Live Carts.

• If you do not see any contact information on this screen, you will want to make sure your store is allowing the collection of this information by clicking on CartIDLog Settings and checking the box next to: Enable_Collect_Cart_Contact_Info
• Contact information (i.e. Customer ID, Phone Number, Email Address) will only be collected if the customer is logged into their customer account while adding items to cart, or if they have entered their information on the one-page-checkout.

• To view the contents of the cart, click on the Cart ID and the information will appear in the Quick Edit Window (Example below) This shows all products added to this cart
• Under the Quick Edit Window, you have an option to Bring the cart to the Storefront or Phone Order Page. This is handy if you get a customer that calls in that was unable to checkout, however added a lot of items to their cart already.
• Keep in mind, this page shows Abandoned AND Live Carts together. There is no way to tell the difference in the two, however you can see the last date and time modified to see if this Customer may still be shopping around and may still checkout.