Week 6: CASA Marketing - Ch.5 eCommerce Analytics Shopify

Shopify is a complete ecommerce solution that allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods. It lets you organize your products, customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders — all with a few clicks of the mouse. It is one of the easiest ways to launch a “real” ecommerce system to learn about tracking ROI with analytics.

You can start a 14-day trial, without access to conversion tracking, or start a plan for $29.00/mon to have full access.

To get started with Shopify, go to the website shopify.com.

Click “Get Started” and proceed to input the information requested. When reaching the question about what kind of product will be sold, after this depending on the product there might be more or less to constitute in the process. When adding a product you will need to provide a title, a description, a type, and a vendor to categorize the product along with an image to represent the product.

Now we can do some more inside work on the site. Customize navigation to per say remove link to blog, if you aren’t going to be blogging on ecommerce its best to remove so people that visit aren’t looking at outdated data or post. Add products to front page to get first instant glance at product by customers. Set up Shopify payment account to be able to get paid. To gain more control of the site with ease and have individuals get easy access to it, a plan will need to be picked for the price of $29.00/mon. Technically, Shopify is free, but to have people access the website a password would be required which is an issue when you’re trying to expand cliental. Next, we can set up prices for products. It would be a good idea to also update the content of the website to make the page more professional, by adding some descriptive material and an About Us link. Other things can be edited, but that will all depend on you personally and how you want to customize it. If you are working with digital products the files for each product will need to be uploaded to where each pertains. Physical products will obviously be mailed once an order has been confirmed. At this point the ecommerce site is ready to run and make sales.

So here are the basics to starting an ecommerce site with Shopify. If you would like to learn more you can reach out to me to my email, or this might be a helpful link: http://docs/shopify.com/manual.

Week 5: CASA MKTG Ch.4 - Reviewing Performance of Campaign

The blog is running and have promoted it through social media. We can now go to Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) and view the traffic of the website or blog.  We can view the number of sessions, page views, duration of visits, and bounce rate. Our goal with this tool is to review performance and analyze it to reach future objectives in traffic for the blog. Another fun feature of Google Analytics is we can take a look at where people are visiting from. So if someone from Poland views your blog, you will be able to find that information.

One concept in analytics is trending, looking at how things perform, overtime. The concept is that adding quality content and making some effort to promote will boost the amount of traffic.

With the help of dashboards your life can be easier. Creating dashboards can organize the performance of the blog from an amount of time in a report.

To create New Dashboard

1.      Click on Reporting at the top

2.      Then Dashboards > New Dashboard

3.      Select Starter Dashboard (name it whatever you want)

4.      Select date range

5.      Click Apply

These dashboards reports can be exported into PDF to be shared or scheduled via email.

Ok, so by this point we have an introduction of how to connect Google Analytics with a website or blog and then promote it to get traffic going. With the collected data, we analyze it and set future goals. If you need any extra help you can refer to CASA Marketing: Intro to Google Analytics or you can reach. 

Week 2: CASA Marketing Ch.1 - Fun with Analytics

After reading the first chapter of CASA Marketing, my interest on digital/online marketing has significantly increased. I found it interesting how LinkedIn showed online marketing as a top skill that got people hired in 2013, but then again we do see that many companies or organizations use online marketing to increase business success. I didn’t think much of online marketing; it has always been on my mind, but I didn’t realize exactly how much in demand it is. This tool is useful more than ever because of the increase technology and computers. I would certainly like to become an effective online marketer, and more employable.

Certainly you have caught my attention for the reasons that it can open job opportunities and/or I can implement this into a company or business that I one day hope to open. I am excited for this course and what I will learn to be able to apply to my professional life. In the chapter you stated, “I realized that it would probably be a good idea to consider not just what I felt like doing, but what would be a benefit to a business or organization”. I agree and with the economic struggle we face, businesses and organizations need all the help they can get. We must look at the whole picture, not just what is in one’s self-interest.

           

            There are many web analytic tools that we said we can use such as google analytics, adobe analytics, open source analytics, and social analytics. Freshmen year I had a job with the athletics department where we use the social media to advertise and promote sporting events for the school, which falls under online marketing and social analytics. We posted up statuses or tweets to have students, family, or friends to attend home games for all sporting events and got payed for it. I thought this was pretty cool, so I look forward to this class to broaden knowledge on online marketing and open more doors for future employment.