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Understanding Statistics

One of the greatest aspects of PrestaShop is its unrivaled power in digging up information on customer behavior. Let's see how this is done.

Throughout this section, the manual will succinctly explain the utility of different statistics. By clicking on each of the categories at your disposable in the sidebar of the "Stats" tab, a complete explanation is given, enabling you to understand the data given to you, and pull out the information you want in order to improve your store and your turnover.

Exploring the Various Available Stats

Graph Display Options

A graph can take several forms, depending on your preferences. You can configure them in two different ways.

One: When you click a topic under the stats tab, you should see a graph. The graph options below are shown on the left side of the page. You can then choose the type of display. You can make a display choice that is both aesthetically pleasing and compatible with your browser.

On each page, you will have access to the navigation sidebar of course, but also to two settings:

Two: You can also access these settings by clicking on the "Setting" sub-tab, under the "Stats" tab.

Compared with the first option, this second option includes comments on the various "graph engines" used. You can also automatically select the way the statistics will be erased from your shop.

Erasing data will usually make the site more responsive, and thus improve the comfort of your visitors. You have four choices, depending on your traffic and your server's performance: Never, Week, Month or Year.

Search Engines

A lot of you visitors will come from search engines. In order to know what they were looking for, and how you can improve your website for their search queries, you need to know their queries.

While Google has the biggest share of search engines users, there are many other search engines that people could find you website with, you therefore have to be able retrieve their search request too. When an unknown search engine is starting to bring regular visitors, it is high time that you add it to your database.

Adding a Search Engine

There is very little to do to add a new search engine to your list.

Let's say you want to add Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant (note that it is already included in PrestaShop). This is what you need to do:

  1. Get the full referrer URL for the search. For instance, http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=kids+shoes&inputT=1303
  2. Take the server part, which is specific to that search engine, and put it in the "Server" field. In our case, "baidu".
  3. Find the query variable:
    1. Find the query string. It should be a set of letters, followed by an "=" sign, followed by the query itself, closed by a "&" or the end of the string. In our case, it's "wd=kids+shoes".
    2. The query variable is the set of letters before the "=" sign. In our case: "wd". Put that in the "$_GET variable" field.

Referrers

PrestaShop gives you detailed information on sites that generate traffic for you. Click on the "Referrers” sub-tab. The page below appears:

The function of a referrer site can be likened to that of an extranet. When you create an affiliate campaign through another site you can allow the other site access to all of the activity it will have made for your site.

Let's add a referrer site: click on "Add New", and fill out the form below.

The affiliate space enables you to create privileged access for your partners. They will then have access to all statistics on the flow from their site to your online store. To create their privileged space, fill in the name and password fields. Then define how you will pay based on
traffic and sales generated in the fields provided. Finally configure the URL of the origin of the traffic you will receive.