So I thought I would update Matt’s great post with the new tracking code and directions for using Google analytics with your ProStores site.

1. Go to your page template manager in ProStores and create a baseline of your footer and confirmation page
2. Remove any previously installed Google tracking code from your templates. If this is your first time installing your tracking code you don’t have to worry about this.
3. Open your footer template and insert the tracking code from Google Analytics into your template. If you don’t have the new tracking code <click here> and cut and copy it (you must replace my UA-xxxxxxx-x with your unique UA from Google).
4. Save and Publish.
5. Open your order confirmation page template and paste the code in this file <click here> at the very end of the file (again you must replace my UA-xxxxxxx-x with your unique UA from Google).
6. Save and Publish.

Now you must enable E-Commerce in Google Analytics.

1. Log into your Google Analytics account and go to your website profiles. Click edit for the ProStores website we are working with.
2. In section “Main Website Profile Information” click edit.
3. Under the section for e-commerce select the radio button for “Yes, an E-Commerce Site” and save the changes!

You should be up and running in Google Analytics.

Now if you would like to learn how to setup goals and track your sales funnel for all step of the checkout process check out Matt’s post on

setting up goals with ProStores in Google Analytics (which is still up to date so I wont recreate it).

I will try and post a video of this content in the next few days.

If you found this info helpful please consider sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or subscribing to my feed! Thanks.

Unique Content

Surely I am not the first person to suggest that a major cornerstone to SEO success in eCommerce is having unique content and not just using the manufacture provided content. Search engines love unique content. If your product page looks identical to the same product page on all of your competitors sites you aren’t creating much value. The search engines (and your customers) will know it too! Using only manufacturer provided information on your product pages will cause duplicate content issues with search engines, but even more importantly, there is almost no reason for anyone to link to your product page.

While it is easy to suggest that you never use a manufacturer description in your store and viola, SEO problems solved, the reality of that is not so simple. Rewriting thousands of product descriptions can be a huge undertaking. Changing a few words here and there is not going to cut it either. Additionally if you have several products which are very similar, you should always try and write a unique description for each product. If you don’t not only do you run the risk of duplicate content issues with your competitors, but you have duplicate content and pages competing against each other on your own site.

Valuable Content

Unfortunately unique isn’t enough. Unique junk is still just junk! It’s important to remember the main goal of the search engines is to deliver the best results to their users. So delivering unique content will help aid them in that goal but is not an end in itself. Their goal is not to deliver unique content, but valuable content!

When evaluating your site, store or a product you are trying to rank for, you should ask yourself, why should you rank #1 for a search term? Do you have the best product on the market? Do you offer the best user experience? Do you have the best user reviews? The point of this exercise is to take an honest look at what about what you offer is unique AND valuable from the standpoint of a visitor to your website.

Here are some great examples of e-tailers offering great unique valuable content!

Amazon.com

Amazon.com is one of the best examples of this. With literally millions of products, manually rewriting every manufactures product description is not feasible. One of the ways they have dealt with this is through User Generated Content. Amazon has fostered a community of unpaid product reviewers. In fact not only are they unpaid but they are also their customers, and they tend to be some of the best in the industry. I often put much more faith in reviews I read on Amazon.com then I do in professional reviews from places like consumer reports or similar sources.

Amazon also shares some very interesting facts that they mine from their customer database without compromising privacy information. By sharing what other products are frequestly bought with the product and what customers ultimately buy after viewing a product, they are not only providing a better user experience, but they are also encouraging someone who may be blogging or writing about a product to link to the product. Some other ideas would be to share sales trends, or how popular an item is compared to other similar items, etc. Great user experience and lots of great reasons for someone to link to your page.

Zappos.com

Zappos has taken an interesting approach to providing unique, valuable content. They have done an excellent job of photographing every product in their catalog. They go way above and beyond the photos provided by the manufactures. A quick visit to their site and I can see my new Innov8 F-lite 230 running shoes (see how they just got me to link to them) from 7 different angles, in all four colors available and complete with a minute and a half video of the founder of Innov8 talking about and showing you this very shoe. Pretty cool considering I am hard pressed to find this shoe in an actual store, and the manufactures site only has 2 pictures of it.

The other benefit to this is that Zappos now can license this content, which it appears they are doing after a quick visit this product page at Shoemart.

Did you find this post valuable? If so please help us share it!

T2T Marketing is now Blink Web Technologies. We have teamed up with some top creative talent including Shane Simmons from Nerd Life Design and some of the best developer talent we could find to launch Blink Web Technologies!

We believe this new brand will allow us to align our service offering much more closely with what our clients have told us they are looking for. Please check out the new website and see what services we have added to our offering.

We are also launching a referral program where you can earn up to $500 for each referral. Details coming soon! If you have a referral in the meantime please contact me ASAP and I will get you the details.

Stay tuned for lots of great things in 2011.