Magento eCommerce Unofficial Blog

A great feature to have in Magento from the beginning would be support for Google Analytics which gives you all sorts of detailed statistics about your site and allows you to visualize how many users “walk down” a certain path, complete goals (like placing an item in their cart, completing an order, etc). It wouldn’t be very hard to add Analytics into your own Magento site, but it would be even easier if they built it into the default templates and you just had to fill in your Analytics code number.

What would also be neat is support for Google’s Website Optimizer or something similar to it. If you haven’t use the Website Optimizer yet, you use it by inserting javascript into a page where you want to run a test and then you set up test cases. Say you have 2 graphics you want to try advertising your free shipping and you don’t know which one performs better. Instead of just trying one, you set up a test case and the Website Optimizer will actually give some of the people one and some the other and report statistics on how well each one does. It goes beyond this, though, as you can do multivariate tests with multiple variables. Of course, the time needed to run goes up exponentially, but you can run some very useful tests. I don’t know if it would be best to integrate Google’s Website Optimizer into Magento since it relies on javascript, but perhaps something similar could be built right into Magento? That would be cool — split your pages into sections and then you could have the option of rotating sections and seeing what performs the best.