Are you using Google Analytics? Here is why you should be.

Google Analytics (http://analytics.google.com) - formerly Urchin - is a full-featured web site analytics tool designed to track everything about how people use your web site. The nice thing about it is that it's free; the problem is that since it was introduced by Google, interest in it was so high that now they can only accept sign-ups on a waiting list. Nevertheless, if you aren't using it, go to http://analytics.google.com to sign up.

Once you sign up, you get a small piece of JavaScript code that you insert into the head-tags variable of your store. With that in place, Google Analytics starts to collect all kinds of information about how your visitors use the site. You get a whole bunch of reports including demographics, navigation, browser stats, etc. Google Analytics is also capable of collecting merchandising and conversion rate information, although setting this up with the Yahoo! shopping cart is anything but easy. There is a thread about this on the Yahoo! Store Users' Forum at www.ystoreforums.com (search for Analytics).

Two very useful reports you can get are the browser stats, and the keyword reports. With the browser stats report you can find out what percentage of your visitors go to your site over fast Internet connections, and at what screen resolution they browse your store. This can be important if you are thinking about redesigning your store. If the vast majority of your visitors browse over high-speed Internet connections, then you can make your pages richer by not worrying too much about download speed. And if it turns out that most of your visitors have screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 or higher, you can increase your layout size to fit a lot more information into the same screen.