Setting up zones

The zones needed for work in Sales-n-Stats can be easily set up, edited and deleted via Main Menu->Tools->System settings->Zones.

All non-classified pages of your website primarily belong to one zone named 'Default zone'. When you create zones of your own, pages are taken away from this zone and added to the zones you create (for example, 'Catalog', 'Cart', 'Checkout'). Every site page can belong to only one zone, so pageviews that take place in some zone you defined are no longer counted in the 'Default zone'. Larger zones can have subzones (for example, to pay particular attention to a certain product category, say 'Books', create a separate subzone 'Books' within the zone 'Catalog' which includes all of your product pages). Pageviews that take place in a subzone are excluded from the main zone.

Site zones scheme

The package for integrating Sales-n-Stats with shopping carts allows you to import shopping cart-specific zone settings. If you do so, the zones of your site will be named 'Default zone', 'Catalog', 'Product info', 'Cart', 'Checkout' and 'Help & Legal'. If the imported zone set does not exactly meet the requirements of your business, modify the initial zone settings. For example, add more zones, delete the zones you do not want to monitor, rename zones and change the page range included into each of the zones.

If you go to the 'System settings' section and click on the '+' box next to 'Zones' in the tree menu, you will see all the zones of your site nested within the 'Zones' folder. Subzones are nested within zone folders.

The dialog section to the right of the tree menu demonstrates the settings of the zone currently selected in the tree menu. Selecting the root level 'Zones' allows you to view the settings of the 'Default zone'.

Site zones in the ‘System settings’ dialog.

Any zone/subzone in Sales-n-Stats is characterized by a name (needed for the zone button and the zone window title bar) and a color (appears in the zone window color bar to help you distinguish it from the other zones). The name and the color of the zone selected in the tree menu can be seen in the upper part of the dialog pane.

The 'Patterns' section defines the page range included into the selected zone (Refer to 'Defining zone patterns' for more information).

The lower part of the dialog ('Subzones' area) shows the subzones of the selected zone (if any).

Dividing your site into zones

You can set up as many zones in a site as you want but we recommend you keep the number of zones within the limits of reason. Considering the fact that an average person can keep in the span of attention 5-7 objects, the average number of zones monitored by an operator should be the same. Probably not all the sections of your site are equally important, so we do not recommend to create more zones than is absolutely necessary.

As to the content of your zones, again, it depends on what is convenient to you and what kind of information about your visitors' behavior on the site you want to get.

The basic set of zones for an e-commerce website is probably the following:

•	Default zone (all your website pages if they are not ascribed to other zones);

•	Catalog (all the pages on which products can be viewed);

•	Product info (the pages where the customers can see the details about all the products in Catalog);

•	Cart (the page where the customers can see and manage the contents of their shopping carts);

•	Checkout (the page(s), where the customers can choose the shipping and payment methods for their orders and provide their payment details).

•	Help, Legal (help and other useful information).

Use this set of zones as is or set up zones of your own depending on the structure of your site.

Sample zones

After you finish using Quick Start and begin adjusting Sales-n-Stats to work with a real website, your Web control and communication center retains the zones it used for Quick Start demonstration of how zones work. These sample zones are Quick Start oriented and cannot be used for monitoring a real site. You need to remove the sample Quick Start zones and create some new zones in Sales-n-Stats that will represent the zones of your actual site or import the prepared zones from the existing file.

In practice, creating zones in Sales-n-Stats boils down to naming the zones and telling Sales-n-Stats where they are, which means just providing the system with the URL addresses of the pages which should be included into this zone. You do not have to enter all the URLs manually one by one: the location of a site zone may often be described by a pattern covering several URL addresses.

Creating zones

To add a new zone:

1.	Do one of the following:

•	Click on 'Zones' in the tree menu, then click Add.

•	Right-click on 'Zones' in the tree menu, select New zone from the context menu.

2.	Think of a name for the zone and enter it into the input box that will appear. Click OK.

Now you need to specify the necessary zone settings.

3.	Select the zone color: click on the button next to the 'Color' field and choose a color from the dialog box that will appear. Click OK.

4.	Define the page range that should be included into the new zone:

a)	Click Add.

b)	Enter a pattern describing the location of pages that should be included into the zone (Refer to 'Defining zone patterns').

c)	If necessary, repeat steps a-b to add more patterns.

A pattern for the zone ‘Registration’ has been set.

5. To remove a pattern, select the pattern line and click on Remove.

6. Click Save to apply the changes.

Note: Before you click Save, you can cancel any changes by clicking Discard.

Creating subzones

To create one or more subzones in a zone:

1.	Select the zone in which you want to create a subzone.

2.	Right-click in the 'Subzones' section and select New Zone from the context menu, or click Add.

3.	Think of a name for the subzone and enter it into the Input box that will appear. Click OK. The subzone name will be added to the tree menu with a red plus sign. Now you need to specify the zone settings.

4.	Select the subzone color.

5.	Add one or more patterns.

6.	Click Save to apply the changes. The red plus sign will be removed.

Note: Before you click Save, you can cancel any changes by clicking Discard.

Defining zone patterns

Describing the location of a zone boils down to providing the system with a list of URLs that should be included into the zone. However, this hardly seems feasible if your site is large. That's why Sales-n-Stats is capable of using 'patterns'. A pattern is an expression that allows you to describe the location not only of a specific web page, but of a group of web pages with similar URLs. When page URLs differ but slightly, there is no need to enter each URL separately: all you need to do is make up a pattern that will cover the whole page range.

If you are using a predefined set of zones you obtained with the integration package, all the zone patterns are already defined. However, if necessary, you may edit these patterns, remove unnecessary patterns or add patterns of your own (this, of course, will change the page ranges of your zones).

URL patterns

Mind that the structure of a pattern must precisely match the structure of the URL that you want to be identified by this pattern. You should be careful defining patterns to cut off unwanted URLs.

No matter whether you are creating a pattern from scratch or just modifying an existing pattern, you should keep in mind that patterns use a special syntax.

The asterisk * is a wildcard character that matches any number of characters, including none. The default pattern *://*/* matches any URL. Any other patterns can be formed on the basis of the default pattern by modifying the portions that matter for identifying a particular URL/set of URLs. For example, the pattern http://*/*?mode=* matches any URL that contains a parameter 'mode' with any value; the pattern http://*msn.com matches any URL whose host name ends in 'msn.com', like http://www.msn.com or http://msn.com.

The dollar sign $ anchors the expression to the end of the target string. When this sign appears as the last character of the pattern expression, Sales-n-Stats “understands” that the end of the URL included into a zone must be the same as the pattern expression. For example, if you set the pattern for a certain zone as http://example/xcart/home.php$, the only page that will be included into this zone will be http://example/xcart/home.php, while the URLs http://example/xcart/home.php?cat=3 or http://example/xcart/home.php?cat=26 will not.

Here are some examples that demonstrate how pattern syntax affects the results:

pattern	matches	doesn't match
http:////cart.php?target=checkout	http://host/lc/cart.php?mode=abc&target=checkout	http://host/lc/cart.php
http://msn/?mode=	http://msn/lc/cart.php?target=help&mode=abc	http://msn.com http://msn/lc/cart.php?target=help&mode
http://msn/*?mode	http://msn/lc/cart.php?mode	http://msn/lc/cart.php?mode=abc
http://msn/?mode=$	http://msn/lc/?mode=abc	http://msn/lc/?target=help&mode=abc
http:////cart.php	http://host/~leo/cart.php?target=product http://host/cart.php	http://host/acart.php http://host/cart
http:////shop/*	http://host/~leo/shop http://host/~kvd/shop/index.html http://host/shop	https://host/shop
:///*	any URL

Adding a new pattern

Click Add. A new line will appear inside the 'Patterns' box with the default pattern http://*/* in it.

1.	Enter the necessary pattern (either modify the default pattern or remove the default pattern altogether, copy the URL of a site page and paste it into the pattern box using the key combination of 'Ctrl+v').

2.	If the added pattern does not cover all the pages that should be included into the zone, add more patterns (repeat steps 1-2).

3.	Click Save to apply the changes.

To edit an existing pattern, double-click on it, modify the pattern and click Save.

To delete a pattern select the pattern, click Remove and click Save to apply the changes.

Renaming a zone

Right-click on the name of the zone (either in the tree menu or in the list of zones in the 'Zones' section).

1.	Select Rename from the context menu. 'Rename zone' input box will appear.

2.	Enter a new zone name.

3.	Click OK. The name of the zone in the tree menu and the 'Name' field in the zone settings will be updated. A red asterisk (*) sign will appear next to the zone name in the menu to signify some changes have been made.

4.	Click Save to apply the changes. The red asterisk will be removed.

Editing a zone

Click on the name of the zone you want to edit in the tree menu or right-click on the appropriate zone in the tree menu and select Edit from the context menu.

1.	Make the necessary changes and click Save.

Deleting a zone

Right-click on the appropriate zone in the tree menu and select Remove from the context menu or click on 'Zones' in the tree menu, select the necessary zone in the list of zones and click Remove.

1.	Click Save.