Social computing eCommerce IT Toolbox Home

A full set of notes and activities will be published here over the course of the module. Anyone is welcome to join in.

hide alert

Ecommerce Detective (Activity 4)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 23, 2009 [2547 views]

A challenging but I hope interesting activity this week. Using the same site as last week, I want you to try and discover the answers to the following questions.

The deadline is Wednesday 28th October at midnight.

You will need to make notes on the answers to each question before completing the survey to feed back your answers.

If you cannot find an answer leave that part of the survey blank and complete the rest.

Questions
  1. Who are the visitors to this site?
  2. What other sites do people who go to this site go to?
  3. What server software is being used?
  4. When did the company launch its first site?
  5. When did the site last have a major upgrade?
  6. How many visitors does this company get per month?
  7. How many other sites link to this one?
  8. What is the PageRank reputation for this site?
  9. What is the AlexaRank reputation for this site?
  10. What keywords bring people to the home page?
  11. What keywords are being used to advertise this site (if any)
  12. Discuss which of your findings most surprised you and why?
Tools and clues

You can answer some of the questions just by looking but you will probably need to explore the web in ways you have never done before. There are many free tools for analysing different aspects of sites. Let me know if you find some good ones. Here are some tools that will help.

http://www.Google.com – extended search – try “link:www.url.com” in the search box
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
http://www.URLTrends.com
http://www.domaintools.com
http://www.Netcraft.com
http://www.TrafficEstimate.com
http://www.SeoMoz.org
Keyword Analyser
http://www.archive.org - The Wayback machine
http://www.google.com/adplanner
http://www.spyfu.com

Here is a link to the survey to enable you to report back your findings http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/195310/ecommerce-activity-4

Recent comments:

On October 25, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Oscar wrote:

hello jonathan. im doing ur activity 4 and im stuck. on what u mean by question 2. Describe what you found out about the visitors to this site. do u mean like what type of things they buy or look at etc.. and What keywords or phrases bring people to the home page. is that like within the site. or when they search like google to find the site.

Jonathan replies: I'd like you to find out as much as you can about the actual visitors. Are they young or old? Male or female? Use the tools, you may be surprised - it depends on the site. The same is true of the second question - try and find both.

What do you think?






Add your comments

Recent postings in this section

Site map | Copyright | Credits | Contact
© copyright 2004-2010 Jonathan Briggs. Content licensed under Creative Commons

 

Sound installation at Vauxhall Ragged School as part of London Open House

Sound installation at Vauxhall Ragged School as part of London Open House [Sep 20, 2009]

Photo blog

Search

About this site

This site is an educational resource, a research project and a publication channel written by Jonathan Briggs, Professor of eCommerce at Kingston University.
As well as being Professor at Kingston, Jonathan...

Read more

Creative Commons License
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence

Interesting stats

Locations of visitors to this page