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May 15th, 2008 by Jim Cain

If you talk to ten different eCommerce sites that are using Analytics, the odds are good that at least five of them are using Google Analytics. If you talk to ten different Google Analytics (GA) users, probably only one of them is using their Goal tracking for anything other than cart conversions. Long story short, an awfully large percentage of retailers aren’t getting a lot of value out of Google analytics.

This is in part due to the fact that most companies using GA don’t tend to have a full time analyst asking specific questions of the website data, and also due to the fact that while GA is great free software, there is no vendor support in terms of best practices for tool usage. (If you want an analytics vendor with a top-notch customer support/analysis team, look no farther than our friends at Coremetrics)

Here are two alternate goals, and one new way to look at them using Google Analytics. They are easy to set up and monitor, they will give you a lot more visibility into website outcomes, and will help you start asking the right questions about what you can be doing to optimize your website for increased conversions.

For additional information about how to set up goals in Google Analytics, click here.

Goal 1: ‘About Us’ page visitor conversion

If a visitor cares enough to want to learn about your business, they are that much closer to converting. Set up a goal funnel with the first page being the About Us page URL, and the last page being the transaction completed page. You now have an report that shows you the conversion rates of people who visit your ‘about us’ page as part of a session. Once you have the results in, you can start applying changes to this page in an attempt to increase conversion outcomes.

Goal 2: Micro Conversion Points

A micro conversion point is a non shopping cart transaction. Examples include newsletter signup, catalog request or wish list signup. Better understanding of how many visitors choose these micro-conversions will give a better understanding of what a visitor really wants from your site. Also if any of these micro-conversion points has multiple steps, you can build a goal funnel and look at step abandonment, just like for your shopping cart.

Goal Tip: Use filters to segment your goal results

By filtering your Google results based on different traffic source segments, you can get a much better understanding of how visitors from different sources convert for different goals. For example, what does the cart abandonment funnel look like for direct type in visitors vs. paid search traffic? Setting up funnels is also fairly straightforward, and you can see a more detailed posting from the team at Lunametrics on how to accomplish this by clicking here.

A better understanding of site outcomes equals an ability to optimize them over time. Taking the steps above will add invaluable marketing insight to your analytics tool.

Cheers,

Jim

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Jim Cain, eCommerce, Web Analytics, Personalization | 1 Comment »

May Webinar: Expert Jason Burby Talks Personalization with Sitebrand

May 14th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

As part of Sitebrand’s monthly webinar series, I’m very excited to tell you about our upcoming webinar because the very insightful Jason Burby from ZAAZ is my co-presenter…

Our topic is ~ Web Personalization: Putting the “Cha-Ching” Before and After the Check-Out. Isn’t that intriguing? If you’re like amost people I’ve told, it’s the cha-ching after the check-out that has you screaming for more.

So do yourself a favour and register today.

As added incentive, be one of the first 25 people to register and you’ll win yourself a free copy of the book “Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions” by Jason Burby and Shane Atchinson.

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Carolyn Gardner, eCommerce, Web Analytics, Personalization | No Comments »

Should Dayparting be a part of your day?

May 6th, 2008 by Jim Cain

Looking at online sales cycles is a Pandora’s box. Once you decide to look into your analytics to truly understand what steps a visitor needs to go through in order to convert, you always end up with more questions than answers. There are a number of ways you can look at what it takes for a visitor to become a customer. You can go the:

Engagement route: Understanding how and why a visitor moves through your site in a given session towards conversion.

Recency and frequency route: Understanding separate sessions and time between sessions as steps towards conversion.

Micro and macro conversions route: Looking at how pre-transactional conversions like newsletters, wishlists and downloads move a visitor towards a conversion.

I could go on for a while with other options, but the purpose of this post was to make things even more confusing by injecting a new term into the mix: Dayparting. (place maniacal cackle here).

Dayparting is a fairly established term in the offline marketing space, used for managing media buys in radio and television. An example of this is selling radio ads against the morning daypart so that you can have the largest audience (people in cars).

Dayparting is now making it’s way into online media buys, and there are some great articles and whitepapers on the web about how to optimize your search spend based on time of day. It makes pretty good sense. Look at your conversion rate based on the hour of the day (one click in Google Analytics by the way), or even the day of the week. Look at where conversion is higher. Plan keyword spend accordingly.

Using this concept for in-site marketing makes for a very compelling case. We have a few customers at Sitebrand who run personalization campaigns based on the day of the week, but imagine if you tweaked your website so that:

in the mornings you ran your normal site messaging, as people are looking at you as they drink their morning coffee and aren’t buying
during lunch hours and early afternoon your site pushes your wishlist instead of a sale, because people are looking for products on your site that they will buy later at home.
From 5-10 pm you ran aggressive sales messages, knowing that people are on the home computer and much more likely to convert.
From 10pm to 7am you run more discounts and promos, because you might get some ‘midnight special’ bumps to conversion.

Especially if run against a control group, this would make for a very interesting look at conversion from a dayparting perspective. That is, until another way to look at online sales cycles catches my eye….

Cheers,

Jim

PS. Note that I didn’t even TRY to bring time zones into this. Neo, there is no spoon.

Posted in Jim Cain, Conversion, Social Media, Web Analytics, Personalization, eCommerce, Search Marketing | No Comments »

Internet Retailer Focus on Web Personalization

April 25th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

Internet Retailer Logo

If you check out the home page of Internet Retailer today, you can’t help but notice all the attention on web personalization. In addition to one story featuring Danskin and how they boosted online conversion rates by 56% using Sitebrand’s Retail Marketing Suite, it also lists other awesome success stories. With headlines like these, it’s hard to wonder why only 17% of best-in-breed companies are doing personalization (And I’m not making that number up, request a copy of the Aberdeen Group Report on Personalization for tons of great stats regarding the impact of personalization).

Here are the headlines I’m talking about:

Danskin.com makes sales jump with personalization tool

Crutchfield gets personal with shoppers to lift sales and click-throughs

Personalization lifts average order value for Austat’s Golf

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Carolyn Gardner, Web Analytics, eCommerce, Personalization | No Comments »

Should Site Optimization fall into your keyword budget?

April 22nd, 2008 by Jim Cain

The blogosphere right now is abuzz with discussions about the current economic downturn and what impact it will have on eCommerce sales, and the associated budgets that eMarketers will be given.

Forrester research sees eCommerce bucking the downturn trend, with online spending actually going up by a predicted 17% in 2008. That said there will still be a tightening of belts as far as spending is concerned, with most of the spending freezes taking place against in-site technologies. Search will continue to grow, as it is both vital to online sales and the most easily provable from a tactical ROI perspective.

According to our friends at Marketing Sherpa, while “38% of marketers are spending more on online tactics, such as paid search, natural search, email marketing and online events” this growth is happening at the expense of in-site technologies as “B-to-B and B-to-C marketers are conserving budget dollars by renegotiating contracts with vendors and agencies”

So let me get this straight. Online stores are spending more money on getting people to walk in the front door of the store, and less money on making sure they walk out of the store with a product in hand. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, especially when you listen to an online brand that has a keen grasp of the big picture.

I listened to a great speech at Shop.org by Patrick Byrne, COO of Overstock.com. It would take a series of blog posts to detail all the interesting things that have been done/are being done by the Overstock.com team, but two major points stood out:

While they came late to the party regarding natural search optimization for Google, they have made search a number one priority over the last few years.
They are in the process of rebuilding their marketing programs, customer service programs and website experience around 5 pre-defined visitor segments.

They recognize that while increased eyeballs on website equals increased revenue, the only way to break the vicious cycle of search reliance is though optimization.

I know that most of the people reading this don’t have Overstock.com budgets, but try a simple exercise.

Pull up an analytics report on the conversion rate for one of the product categories that has received budget for keyword buys and search optimization.
Look at the percentage of traffic and conversion rate for the traffic segment.
Compare the conversion rate of this type of traffic to your site average and if it is lower, calculate your potential revenue opportunity.

There is a lot of money that gets left on the table by making traffic generation of any type your primary marketing mechanism. You should be budgeting time and money to optimize visits within your site as a logical component of your search marketing initiatives, especially if you want to take advantage of the 17% growth of the only growing retail market.

Cheers,

Jim

Posted in Conversion, Optimization, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Web Analytics, Personalization, eCommerce, Search Marketing | No Comments »

Smart (not more) keyword spends boost conversion…

April 17th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

All too often I hear experts saying that if you pay attention to analytics conversion reports…matching high conversion rates with high performing keywords…and then proceed to spend more on those sources of visitors (i.e. search), etc., you will magically increase conversion even more. This is the old school way of looking at the power of keywords as they relate to converison.

Yes, I totally agree that understanding keywords and teeing them up with search marketing will bring traffic to your site. And when that visitor is treated to the experience that meets their intent, things are good - i.e. conversion is a few clicks away. But is it always a slam dunk? Absolutely not. From the point of landing on your site to the point of conversion, there are soooooo many things that can derail conversion. Site distraction alone is a big one. Not getting the right information another. I could go on, but you’re busy.

Smart marketers are thinking differently. Allow me to brag about one Sitebrand customer, Limoges Jewelry, who got serious with their analytics by actioning the data with personalized web campaigns targeted to first-time visitors, keywords, affiliates and geo-locations. Never been to Limoges? Check it out and experience their first-time visitor campaign now. Note - it’s up top, right beside the logo…if you see nothing but what space there then you’re part of the control group’s default content…better luck next time!

Anyhow by building personalization into the marketing mix, Limoges has generated over $1 million in combined and promoted product revenue. Did that get your attention? You should read the full case study, but for the purpose of this post, here’s the deal on how you can seriously impact the success of your keyword investments…

Getting back to keywords…

Through their analytics reports, Limoges could see that a lot of converting visitors were looking for engraved couples jewelry. They have a couple jewelry page which is what many sites would point to and do quite well with. But instead, Limoges went further. They added personalization that went beyond the initial landing page…

So here goes in a nutshell - below is a standard screenshot demonstrating someone who has typed ”engaged couples jewelry”…

screen1

Below is the landing page these types of keyword visitors would see. Psst - personalization for these visitors is happening at the top right beside the Limoges logo…

screen2

As you can see, this special offer related to “free engraving” sits here. But it also stays with the visitor beyond the landing page reminding them of their initial intent…ultimating improving conversion, revenue and customer satisfaction.

But you know what? This wasn’t the top performing campaign in terms of overall lift. You’ll have to read the case study to find out. Is it first-time visitor campaigns? Affiliate campaigns? Geo-targeted campaigns?

Posted in Conversion, Optimization, Customer Experience, Carolyn Gardner, Web Analytics, Personalization, eCommerce, Search Marketing | 1 Comment »

Thoughts from Shop.org: Marketing vs. Sales

April 11th, 2008 by Jim Cain

Just got back from the Shop.org regional in Scottsdale with two new insights. The first is that Arizona is MUCH nicer than Ontario as far as weather is concerned, and the second is the purpose of this blog post.

eCommerce marketing should not be treated the same way as traditional marketing.

There is no implied insult in this statement, rather a suggestion that there are much more tangible revenue numbers associated to eCommerce marketing, and in order to be truly relevant, this sales/conversion component must be directly addressed or risk being ignored.

At Shop.org, I sat in on great sessions and panels, had in-depth conversations with some really talented professionals in the eCommerce space, and watched really closely to see what statements and ideas were the most engaging of the overall audience. This was especially easy in the main ballroom sessions, where you could glance at the room and see when people were engaged and taking notes, or bored and playing on their blackberries.

Invariably, the pens came out when the topics were about selling, whether that topic was repeat sales to existing customers, or new customer acquisition through search, affiliate, or email.

Conversely, looking around the room when the topic was pure marketing/branding I saw a lot of people playing brick breaker on their phones. The same with my one on one discussions. Highest interest was always on growing sales and conversions.

If you are reading this as an eCommerce marketing professional, you are rolling your eyes right now. “OF COURSE it’s all about growing sales!” But think about the statement and then answer this question.

Outside of eCommerce, name an industry where people with pure-marketing jobs have defined sales quotas or to use industry parlance, conversion goals.

I can’t think of one, and I have been in sales and marketing for almost a decade. Every other industry has marketing as demand generation (funnel filling) with a separate sales mechanism in place for deal completion. These marketers still have goals and accountability, but they are not the owners of direct revenue targets.

Only in ecommerce do marketers have the job of filling the sales funnel, and then moving people through it. If you can not grow your conversion rate, you will not keep your job. (place Glengarry Glen Ross quote here….”AIDA!”)

In the attached image (Thanks to Darryl and Eric from the Sitebrand marketing team) you can clearly see the additional functions an eCommerce marketing team owns that would traditionally be the domain of a sales department. Click on the image to expand.

Having spent a lot of time in enterprise sales, I can definitely tell you that pure marketing is important and valuable but is secondary to hitting my quota. The same feeling was evident in watching the attendees at Shop.org.

So here is my big Arizona eureka moment, which I encourage people to think about (especially if you plan on speaking at events that eCommerce professionals are attending).

eCommerce is an emerging discipline, and as an industry we need to be sharing best practices and new ideas. Just don’t forget that if it doesn’t help grow sales and hit conversion quotas your ideas will end up at the bottom of an ever-expanding to-do list.

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Jim Cain, eCommerce, Web Analytics, Personalization | 2 Comments »

Conversion Report Cards by Practical eCommerce

April 11th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

We all know it’s hard to be totally objective when reviewing our own web sites. Sometimes the obvious just isn’t so obvious. Sure we can look at our web analytics reports for tons of information but we should never forget the power and insight of the human perspective. Well this is exactly what Practical eCommerce does via Conversion Report Cards. By grading willing web sites, the folks at Practical eCommerce reveal insight on:

Findability
Design and Aesthetics
Ease of Use
Persuasion
Promotion
Safety and Trust

Each section is reviewed, discussed and graded from A-F (Note: they’re not afraid to be brutally honest). An overall GPA is also assigned.

The most recent Conversion Report Card was done for Firststreetonline.com -check it out:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/710/Conversion-Report-Card:-Firststreetonline.com/

Think you can handle hearing the good, the bad and the ugly about your site? Go ahead and request a site grading for you site! It’s simple - just send an email to conversion [ at ] practicalecommerce.com and be sure to share your results with me.

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Carolyn Gardner, eCommerce, Web Analytics, Personalization | No Comments »

Upcoming webinar gets up close and personal with analytics

April 8th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

April Webinar

Web analytics data alone won’t improve site performance. But taking action on data-driven insight by personalizing the online experience creates real, measurable impact. According to an Aberdeen Group report* studying the impact of web personalization on Best-in-Class companies: 91% improved conversion, 79% boosted average order size and 62% increased revenue per visit.

To understand how web personalization can make a positive impact your bottom line, join Elizabeth Magill, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Coremetrics, and Carolyn Gardner, Sitebrand’s Director of Customer Experience for a 29-minute webinar where they’ll share their expertise on:

• The practice of web analytics today and how its role is evolving
• The importance of understanding visitor behavior over time and why
• Analytics-driven web personalization case studies that target shopping cart abandonment, geo-locations, first time visitors, keywords, loyalty and more

Following the webinar, you’re invited to participate in an optional 15-minute Q&A session from 2:30-2:45 pm. We encourage you to email your questions in advance to events@sitebrand.com.

* Register today and get a free copy of the Aberdeen Group report called: “This Time It’s Personal: Making Online Experiences Unique”. (Value: $399.00)

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Carolyn Gardner, eCommerce, Web Analytics, Personalization | No Comments »

eMetrics Toronto - Sterne’s Keynote Recap

April 4th, 2008 by Carolyn Gardner

Just back from 3 days at the eMetrics Summit in Toronto! It was a thoroughly enjoyable show and a first for Canada. Boy were we overdue or what?

I was especially impressed by the presentations of Bryan Eisenberg - such passion, Seth Romanow - such understated wisdom, and Jim Novo - such insight. And of course, as the chair of the summit and the president of the Web Analytics Association, Jim Sterne put his everything into the entire show. He went out of his way to introduce people. And his humour and smarts were evident at all times! Even after a few glasses of wine at dinner.

I wish I had time to recap all the great highlights of the summit, but I don’t. So instead I will share some key thoughts that Jim Sterne shared during his opening keynote…here goes:

Sterne basically compared the web to an ecosystem saying it is very large and very complex. What it all comes down to is:

1. Is it working? To work well, you need to consider speed, uptime and lack of errors. After all better customer experiences = happier customers. The significance of creating web sites that foster positive customer experiences was in fact a recurring theme throughout the summit.
2. Is anybody there? And who are they? The importance of looking at IP addresses and using cookies to profile visitors was stressed.
3. Is it working well? This really tied back to the customer experience. It’s no longer enough to just be working. You need to have a web site that works well. To work well, Sterne reminded everyone about the importance of navigation and measurement (understanding the leaks and bounces), durations of visits (don’t assume long visits mean engaged customers…long visits might also mean frustrated customers who can’t find what they’re looking for). And then there’s user consumption - are visitors reading, downloading, registering, buying and all that good stuff? Engagement is also important and this is really all about interaction and contribution which tie into calculators, searches, location finders, surveys and reviews. Thinking about recency and frequency matter as well. And last but not least, it comes down to knowing where your site screws up. BTW, in Sterne’s mind, the magic is really all about “consumption, interaction and contribution”. After all these are the very things that have a huge impact on customer experience. Isn’t that the truth!

Thinking about all these things is a lot of work…and then …you need to ask yourself about outcomes…specifically whether or not your site gets and gives the results it promises. If not, then it’s time to optimize. Optimization is the only way to make web sites better.

Sterne also shared several random thoughts:

1. Ya gotta have goals…specific goals.
2. Treat bad online experiences seriously - they are dangerous and they will damage your brand.
3. Data is not 100% accurate. Consider what visitors are doing - discovering, shopping, learning, comparing, pricing, etc.
4. Pages are now events. Events are actions. Hits stands for “how idiots track success”.
5. Weighting events is worthy of your time.
6. Attribution across all media is critical.
7. It’s always about the customer experience. Capture, analyze and optimize the customer experience. Nothing beats the voice of the customer. You are not your customer. Listening methods include: surveys, focus groups, feedback pages, advisory councils, call a customer day, etc.
8. Find people who ask good questions. Think like a detective. The winner is the one who asks the best questions.
9. Always remember that you are not your customer.
10. Incremental improvement wins the race. Sterne stressed the need to test, measure, test, measure, test, measure…

But you know what - Sterne completely forgot to relate this slide into the overarching theme of optimization. To truly optimize the online experience, you need to do more than test and measure. You also need to REFINE. What Sterne should really say is test, measure, REFINE, test, measure, REFINE. Because if you’re not actioning the data you measure, what the heck are you doing? Just looking at metrics isn’t going to make you successful. But learning from the metrics and making the necessary refinements or adjustments will.

BTW, Jim - if you’re reading this, will you update that slide for me?

PS - Kudos to Andrea Hadley for all her coordination at the eMetrics Summit in Toronto as well!

Posted in Optimization, Customer Experience, Conversion, Carolyn Gardner, Web Analytics, eCommerce | 2 Comments »

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