Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

If you haven’t got any sort of stats gathering program on your site then you should. Stats are very important, especially when it comes to selling stuff online. I’m a huge fan of Google Analytics. A) It’s very in depth and b) it’s my favorite price; free!

If you don’t have a Google Analytics account sign up now, then down the Simple Google Analytics plug-in and install it on your Zen Cart site. The bit we are interested in is the Site Search feature.

1. When in Google Analytics click on edit in the setting column. This is on the first page you see when you login to Google Analytics
2. Click on the edit button in the grey bar at the top. It’s to the right of Main Website Profile Information
3. In the site search section click Do Track Site Search.
4. In the Query Parameter box enter keyword.
   
5. Select no for query parameters
6. Then select no for categories.
7. Click save changes

Now leave it 24hrs or so then in the reports screen click site search under the content section. Maybe do a search on your site yourself so you have a test to look at.

The information this report gives you is very powerful. Here are just some of the things you can get out of this data:

1. You can see if your visitors are finding your products
2. Give you a better idea of how visitors search for products. You can use this data to integrate the search terms into your product descriptions.
3. Potential new products. If you get a lot of searches for a product you don’t sell then consider selling it.
4. If people are doing searches for a product you do sell, but they are not coming up consider altering your product description.
5. Are visitors finding the right pages, which pages did they find when they searched

Plus more. It’s worth checking this report a least once a month and use the data to improve your site. After all it’s free!