Marketplace - Category Page Activity Dashboard

The Category Page View Activity dashboard is a combination of widgets: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), focused metric tables, graphic displays of your data, data tables that can be quickly exported to a spreadsheet for further analysis. The data displayed on the dashboard is intended to give you actionable insights into the traffic to specific categories, which areas capture the majority and minority of views and trends over time. A separate exportable data table gives you details at the customer, guest and session level.

You will see a link to this document in the heading of the dashboard, click on Dashboard Help to access the document.

KPIs

At the top of the dashboard, a selection of KPIs reflect the available categories since inception on the marketplace, how many were visited and how many were visited specifically by your customers.  Each KPI has an expandable section that will show ranked views, how those ranked views trend over time, and how your customer visits compare with guest visits.  You can easily see which of your categories are widely or rarely visited and take steps to either direct traffic to them, or perhaps consolidate them with similar categories.  Likewise, you will see the most popular categories and how your customers and guests visit them.  In the 3 month ranked view comparison, you will see not only the trends over time - you will also see when certain categories outperform others in the traffic.  For example, you might see monthly changes in traffic to a certain category, and at the same time see the next popular categories rise and fall in popularity within the same months. You will want to watch these results and compare them with your expectations, and consider if there has been a targeted change to affect the traffic.  Understanding the cause and effect of this traffic is an important step in determining your strategy to drive traffic to certain areas.  In addition, understanding how your customers drive through your platform as compared with guests can give you good insights for marketing strategies, and special deals "for customers only".

Focused Metrics

There is a mini table of simple ranked category views since inception on the marketplace, which you can view by clicking on the first KPI, # of Category Pages Available. A drop-down view sorted by most viewed categories will appear; you can scroll through the table towards the least visited.  This view can help you decide on changes to the website or how your marketing efforts might change to direct traffic, it can also help you validate decisions that you make to affect traffic.  The leased viewed areas might need attention, either for their content or relevance.  It might be that certain administrative type pages that are legally required are not visited often, you would see that here - it might also be that a new category page is just getting off the ground.  You can gain good insight in the seasoned pages that may not be gaining traffic, or performing above or below expectations.

Graphic Displays

There are sections of graphic displays on the dashboard.  The graphics display how your category pages are visited in relation to each other; side by side graphics allow you to compare the ratios from the current month to the time period you select in the date filter.  This will allow you to measure changes that have resulted from specific initiatives as well as natural trends perhaps due to seasonality in your business.  If your graphics include an "Other" section, click on it to see a further breakdown of the smaller category views.  Below the pie charts, you will see a line chart that represents the popularity of your category pages; this shows most visited categories on the right, and least visited categories on the left.  In the example below there are relatively few categories that represent the majority of views, you can see this with much lower levels for the majority of the categories, and a sharp increase at the right end of the curve. Although this graphic seems simple and unexciting, the insights are important, especially where the majority is represented; consider that the shifts in these categories would be far more impactful than shifts in a lesser viewed area.  Graphics will often tell a story about your business or operations that is not obvious when looking only at metrics.  Look for trends in the data, and which metrics seem to impact the others.  You can make more informed decisions about your business when you combine what your data is telling you with the knowledge you have about influencing factors such as changes to your online platform, targeted advertisements or special sales.

You will see indicators for customer and guest unique page views per session and for all sessions; for the selected date range.  For example, in a certain timeframe customers may view an average of 2 different categories each time they visit, while viewing an average of 5 different categories over the entire timeframe selected.  This will help you understand if visits are more targeted (lower # per session), or open browsing (higher # per session).  You can also gain insight as to the variety of interest over longer periods of time.  Use this information to compare the habits of your customers vs your guests - how different they are and what the causes might be.  Look at different timeframes, when your business has seasonal shifts for example, or when a special sale occurs. Also monitor against your expectations for customers and guests, their behavior might be similar or vastly different to each other - your targeted communications can suggest less visited areas and help affect these metrics towards a wider ranging browse.

Exporting the Data Tables

The data table at the bottom of the dashboard is a granular listings of what is represented in the dashboard.  The table will react to filters set as you are viewing the dashboard, so you are able to see more details about what is impacting the results. There may be times when you want to look at this data, filtered or not, in a spreadsheet or image.  By left-clicking on the 3 dots at the top right corner of the table widget, choose Download and export an image or file.  The recommended file type for a spreadsheet is CSV.  This functionality allows you to shape and model your data for reporting, and importantly to inform your business decisions.