In-cart visitor analytics improvement

[junkyard]

In continuation of older topic on cart's Reports improvements ( http://forum.abantecart.com/index.php/topic,1391.msg5483.html#msg5483 ) -
is there a way to see what product names (keywords) did customers try to look for using abantecart's Search block ?
 There's currently no such thing in the Reports in admin.
Maybe it's possible to somehow edit a file like 
 storefront/view/default_html5/template/blocks/search_top.tpl
 storefront/controller/blocks/search.php
so that it echoes each  $text_keyword  into a plain-text file on filesystem that we could read later on ?   Thanks!

[abantecart]

I agree reports can be improved. This is considered in for the future.

Did you think of trying Google Analytics? 

[junkyard]

No (as well as we do no adwords), having some basic data from awstats and webmaster seemed to suffice so far, and we had little or no time to explore other options. Thanks for tip, we'll try and look into that direction.

[gordontaylor]

Google Analytics is a definite plus and it's easy to implement.  Got to System>General and scroll all the way to the bottom and there is a place to input your Google Analytics data tracker.

GA gives you soooo much good tracking data.

I'm going to write an extension that will allow you to use a php redirect WITH additional tracking data that is captured. I use it all the time on my affiliate business and WOW, it's saved me thousands of dollars. How? I was getting traffic from two advertisers, but no way of telling how much from each. I started using this php redirect and found out that 90% of my traffic was coming from the source I was spending the least on! I shut the other one down, reallocated the funds to the 90% source and tripled my income the very first month.

As good as GA is, this is even better!

[llegrand]

Junkyard - Gordon is right the Google Analytics is quite useful.  Yet another reason for you to update from Version 1.1.6 which didn't have the useful code already embedded, Version 1.1.7 added that feature      You can also embed that in your pages,  your choice.

Gordon - question though on the search terms and Goo-Analytics:  On other projects I seem to be able to get search terms results only when I am using Google Site Search Engine.  I don't know if Abantcart is using that or something else.  If you have any insight into this, please share.

Junkyard is wanting to know what folks are searching for - so that is am important thing here.

Lee

[gordontaylor]

Lee, I have no insight on what AbanteCart is using, and keeping up with what Google does requires at leas a Ph.D.! LOL

I can get on page one of Bing and Yahoo with my eyes closed. Google is a whole different animal.

What works today, doesn't work next week. They are constantly tweaking their algorithm to deliver more relevant content to the searcher, to hell with the developers!

Here is a great keyword tool, easy to use and very relevant.   http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords

Also a paid service that is EXCELLENT in keyword development is spyfu.com

Again, it's a paid service and unless you have a lot of websites your promoting, it's a bit costly for just one or two.

[junkyard]

Thank you, guys! We have looked into GA and found we don't really need it: flying colors and fancy features are fun but all we do check sometimes is an overall trend (no matter that bots are included) where default cpanel's Awstats is pefectly fit (even more). The only thing we did miss was GA's feature Site Search, so we tweaked the storefront/controller/pages/product/search.php to store the searched keywords locally:

if (isset($this->request->get['keyword'])) {
file_put_contents('../tmp/words', date('Y-m-d H:i:s').' -> '.trim($this->request->get['keyword']).PHP_EOL, FILE_APPEND);
}

[gordontaylor]

Outstanding, I'm bookmarking this thread right now! That's a great tweak!