Review: HitBox Professional 3.0

HitBox Professional 3.0
hitboxprofessional.com
http://wilsonweb.com/go/to.cgi?l=hitboxpro
US $29.95/month

Once you have your online store up and running, how do you improve your sales? How do you boost your conversion rate? What can you do maximize the sales process? If you're like me, it's sometimes guesswork rather than hard data that drives changes. If so, I recommend a relatively inexpensive tool with the ability to help small to medium businesses improve sales on an e-commerce site -- HitBox Professional 3.0.

HitBox Personal

You may be familiar with the free version, HitBox Personal (www.hitboxcentral.com). In exchange for having an annoying advertising graphic show up on your webpage, HitBox Personal will give you a lot of information about traffic to your website -- number of visitors, top requested pages, typical paths through your site, and information about your visitors' country, web browser, screen resolution, and plug-ins installed. Very helpful. For many smaller sites, this may be all the information you need.

If you decide to use HitBox Personal, I suggest that you place the annoying graphic substantially below the bottom of your normal page by means of the following HTML code:

You need the   (non-breaking space) between paragraph marks so the web browser doesn't ignore multiple paragraph breaks.

HitBox Personal is easy to install. You open an account and you are given some JavaScript code containing your account number to paste on your webpages. Immediately, HitBox begins to accumulate data on visitors.

The weakness from an e-commerce standpoint is the lack of a search feature. Without it you can't drill down to study the behavior of specific e-commerce pages on your website. You are so flooded with data that your top 25 webpages may not show the key sales and order process pages. Unless you can isolate them, you can't understand what's going on and why.

Stepping Up to HitBox Professional

HitBox Professional v3 is a substantial step up from the free HitBox Personal. The price is pretty reasonable for small businesses that have some online sales to cover costs -- $29.95 per month for up to 50,000 page views. Each additional 1,000 page views are billed at 60¢. (Note: To improve your sales process, you don't necessarily need HitBox Professional on every page in your website, only the key sales pages and perhaps the standard webpages that generate the most traffic to your site.)

HitBox Professional allows you to filter your data by searching on keywords found in webpage titles, categories, etc. Now you to study with a fine-tooth comb the key sales paths, referrers, and problems. Version 3 also adds an e-commerce capability that ties revenue earned to the traffic information, enabling you to determine the most profitable ad campaigns, entry webpages, landing pages, etc.

Webpage Code Installation

Setting up your webpages so they can be tracked through HitBox Professional is pretty simple. You just paste a swatch of JavaScript containing your account number onto every page. I paste them at the bottom of the webpage so only pages that load fully are counted. Here's an example of the code. I've highlighted a few fields in red and omitted most of the incomprehensible stuff.

<script language="javascript">
var _pn="PUT+PAGE+NAME+HERE"; //page name(s)
var _mlc="CONTENT+CATEGORY"; //multi-level content category
var _cp="null"; //campaign
var _acct="WR000000CRPN70EN3"; //account number(s)
var _pndef="title"; //default page name
var _ctdef="full"; //default content category
var _prc=""; //commerce price
var _oid=""; //commerce order
var _dlf=""; //download filter
var _elf=""; //exit link filter
var _epg=""; //event page identifier
var _mn="wp169"; //machine name
var _gn="phg.hitbox.com"; //gateway name

If your site uses Server Side Includes (SSI), it is very simple to paste the code into your SSI for the page bottom and then FTP the modified webpages to your site. Within a few minutes you'll be harvesting information from every webpage. The key pieces of information are: (1) page name and (2) content category. If you don't specify any page or category in the JavaScript, the program will give the webpage title as the default page name, and the subdirectory as the default category. For many purposes, this will be quite adequate. I gave a specific name to my homepage and a couple of pages in my ordering system; otherwise I use the defaults.

If you don't have SSIs, installation requires pasting this code into every webpage you want to track. You can do this through a global search and replace command or with an installation wizard supplied by WebSideStory.

E-Commerce Installation

Installing HitBox Professional so it ties directly into your ordering system is substantially more difficult, since you want to capture two additional pieces of data from your Thank You page -- (1) the order subtotal (commerce price) and (2) commerce order number. This information allows you to track the path and referral page for every individual order, if you like.

Normally, your ordering system dynamically generates the Thank You page and displays it as a receipt that contains quite a bit of information about the order. Many, but not all, shopping cart programs allow you to tap into your Thank You page, but you'll need help from a programmer to capture these fields. WebSideStory gives examples of programming approaches for ColdFusion, Perl, PHP, and ASP languages. Though the samples didn't show the latest version of the JavaScript code and contained occasional errors, I was able to hack together workable code to implement the e-commerce features on both of my e-commerce systems -- a custom ColdFusion application for newsletter subscriptions and a Perl application used in conjunction with my ShopSite Pro shopping cart. As a pretty basic bumbler it took me several hours to get each system working right.

Tweaking Dynamically Generated Thank You Pages

However, while I was at it, I decided to add a couple of specialized features so I could track sales at both the product level and the product category level. Here's how I programmed my ShopSite ordering system:

You'll see how capturing this data comes in handy when we get to the analysis phase.

To summarize, installation of HitBox Professional code for regular webpages was pretty easy. Installation to track e-commerce variables was more difficult.

If your shopping cart program doesn't allow you to pull in the sales total and order number dynamically, you can still learn a great deal by pasting the SSL version of the regular code into the customization section for your Thank You page and then hard-coding your average sales price. 

Tying Together a Separate Website and Ordering System

One nice feature of using HitBox Professional rather than a logfile analyzer is that HitBox Professional continues to track an individual shopper from your main website on one server to your ordering system (which may be on a different server) without missing a beat. HitBox ties the two together for you.

Path Analysis

Once you have installed HitBox Professional, you can learn a great deal about how shoppers get to your order page, and where they hang up before they complete their order. I used the Navigation | Top Paths feature to examine the paths that shoppers take through my site.

Click here to enlarge the Top Paths screen

I studied the last three days of data, but I could learn a lot more if I let two or three months of data accumulate, and then looked for patterns.

The paths screen can be confusing, but by studying the predominant patterns I learned two things I didn't know. In my database of 9,500 articles and resources I offer free Web marketing info, but e-commerce info is available only to paid subscribers.

1. Sent to the wrong landing page. Visitors researching in the database often follow the links to subscribe so they can obtain the key e-commerce data just out of their reach. But instead of being taken to a specific landing page that explained all the benefits of subscribing, they were being taken directly to the subscription page where many of them stopped cold. I didn't remember that was the way I set it up, but HitBox Professional alerted me. Now I introduce an intermediate landing page specifically designed for these frustrated researchers, explaining the benefits offered paid subscribers. I know I'll be able to sell more subscriptions -- that's a no-brainer -- but I wouldn't have seen it without HitBox Professional's path analysis.
2. Changing the order of e-books. Now I have the tools to see if shifting the order in which the books are displayed can boost sales by placing the most popular or highest priced e-book in first position.

I was so excited about what I learned to improve my sales process, that in the midst of writing this review I took half a day to improve my site.

Suddenly, I can see many ways to use this tool. By sorting on two factors (my Thank You page and a content category) I'll be able to track various kinds of sales and find ways to maximize them. (By the way, you can gain much valuable knowledge on path analysis, even if you haven't installed the specific e-commerce sales tracking features.)

Referral Analysis

A second fruitful approach is to study which external URLs generate the most sales or the most interest in various product categories. Now you can study the results of your various PPC or e-mail ad campaigns by giving each a unique landing page. By tracking the referral links to the landing page you can determine the click-through rate and source of the visitors. By tracking the number of Thank You pages associated in the same path as this landing page, you can determine the conversion rate for the campaign.

Keyword Analysis

HitBox Professional has a powerful, searchable search engine keyword analysis feature which shows you which keywords brought the most traffic. But unfortunately the search feature only helps you find particular search words, NOT which search words resulted in getting a visitor to your Thank You page. However, HitBox Professional does show which search engines are driving the bulk of your traffic and which keywords are used to find your site -- intelligence that may help you design more effective PPC campaigns.

Commerce Analysis

HitBox Professional's new Commerce features allow you to calculate not just the number of orders, but also the revenue generated. The various views in the Commerce section let you isolate and analyze the traffic that actually generates revenue:

Help Screens and Support

I found the contextual help screens within the web interface of HitBox Professional to be quite helpful, providing clear but detailed explanations. When I called the technical support phone number for assistance, an intelligent, helpful techie answered my call within 10 or 15 seconds. Customer support seems excellent.

Give It Time

Don't expect HitBox Professional to yield all your site's secrets within the first few days. You're better off setting it up and then waiting for a couple of months of data to accumulate. Then you'll have enough data with which to do meaningful analyses. I found the Navigation path analysis feature far more useful than the Commerce section, since you can study the paths different kinds of shoppers take, looking from the front end -- where they enter the site -- as well as analyzing how your actual buyers came to a sales decision. The more data you have, the more insights you'll gain.

The Bottom Line

In this review I haven't tried to compare HitBox Professional with other web traffic analysis systems, though I think it compares pretty well and is much less work than downloading logfiles for analysis. I have examined from the standpoint of its power to reveal an e-commerce site's problems and boost its conversion rate.

When I compare HitBox Professional to the kinds of site statistics available in Yahoo! Store -- my favorite for great statistics -- I think each has strengths. Yahoo! Store allows you to directly determine revenue by search engine keyword and by referral source. But HitBox Professional allows you to study patterns and improve the internal workings of your site in such a way that you convert more shoppers into buyers. A combination of the two would give you the best of both worlds.

Overall, I found HitBox Professional to be excellent. Certainly, the path analysis, keyword, and search features are quite good and fairly mature. The addition of the Commerce section which ties traffic to revenue is a help, too. Graphs are helpful and flexible. Sometimes I found the web interface slow to display the new screen after a new command, but the correct content would eventually show after a wait.. 

Is HitBox Professional worth its price tag of $29.95 a month? Yes, indeed! So long as your site is making some money, $29.95 per month gives you the tools to understand sales patterns and blockages on your site. What you'll discover -- and the changes these insights prompt -- will pay for HitBox Professional many times over. Strongly recommended.

You can request a 10 day free trial to see how it works
http://wilsonweb.com/go/to.cgi?l=hitboxpro