Improved Search and Referrer Stats

Improved Search and Referrer Stats

Are you a stats junkie? Do you find yourself checking your shop's dashboard on break from work, or in line at the store, or from the restaurant bathroom, and every 15 minutes in between? If so, you probably love seeing the sites and search engines sending visitors to your shop, right? Well, over the last few weeks, we parsed through mountains of stats to clean them up and extract better data from them. Here's how:

  • First, we identified which search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) was used when someone searched and found your shop. We now show this right in your stats, alongside the term they searched for, how many people have used the search term on that search engine in all (not just today), and when the term was last used.

  • Next, we included searches that don't have a term. In an effort to make search more secure, search engines have stopped sending the terms used when someone searches for your shop. However, it's still valuable to know how many visitors are finding your shop from these search engines, so they'll show as [unknown Query].

  • Finally, we got out our shovels and tried to bury as much referrer spam as we could. This type of spam is mostly harmless, but boy is it annoying. So we searched for known offenders and deleted any trace of them.

We hope you enjoy these tidied up and more informative stats, and we plan on feeding your stats addiction even more in the future. Refresh!

25 September 2015

Words by:Matt Wigham

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