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Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ Category

Vote for Erin Richey’s SXSW Panel

Published August 27th, 2010 Ecommerce, Industry, News No Comments

Quick post to rally some votes for Erin’s proposed panel for SXSW in 2011: Predictions, Preferences, and Personalization: Recommendation Engines Grow Up. Voting ends today, so take a few seconds to vote for Erin and the other incredible panels if you have a chance. If you don’t know who Erin is, you can read up on her on LinkedIn or Twitter. We were very excited to have Erin come onboard here at SwellPath a couple weeks ago as a digital analyst.

Look for more info on Erin and the rest of the incredible team here at SwellPath in the next month or so as we finally get around to adding a Team page to the site. Meanwhile, you can follow the SwellPath team’s Tweets or connect with SwellPath on LinkedIn right now.

Don’t forget to vote!

Early iPad Adoption Numbers from Google Analytics

Published April 25th, 2010 Analytics, Ecommerce, Mobile 1 Comment

It’s been 3 weeks since the iPad was released and initial the media frenzy has died down a bit, along with the digital marketing industry’s fascination with the device has subsided a bit. However, for those of us responsible for tracking the activity of visitors on “traditional” web sites, the captivation just is only beginning. Early questions amongst the SwellPath team revolved around how much iPad traffic we would see on our clients’ non-mobile sites, and what kind of engagement would iPad visitors exhibit? Beyond those, would we see different navigational behavior from iPad visitors, and different conversion rates?

SwellPath account coordinator Chris Sullivan dug into Google Analytics last week and pulled data for the first 2-weeks of the iPad’s life (4/3/2010 through 4/16/2010). Overall, the results weren’t mind-blowing, but it was interesting to compare the percentage of total visits that visited via iPads, and the number of pages per visit by these visitors.

Business-to-Business Sites

First, we compared 4 B2B sites that who have a majority (or all) of their customer base working in IT or technology related roles. Here are some highlights:

For the 2-week period as a whole, .18% of visits came from an iPad
The average of daily percentages rose from .18% in week 1, to .21% in week 2
The total increase in iPad visits from week 1 to week 2 was 8.7%
The average pages per visit for iPad visitors was 2.95, 16.1% less than the 3.52 average for all visits.

Business-to-Consumer Sites

Next up we looked at 3 B2C brands with ecommerce components of their sites. Here’s what we found from them:

For the 2-week period, only .11% of visits from the iPad
The average of daily percentages rose almost doubled from .08% in week 1 to .15% in week 2
The total increase in iPad visits from week 1 to week 2 was about 116%
The average pages per visit for iPad visitors was 9.28, only 1.35% less than the 9.41 average for all visits

Additional Findings

There are some other interesting findings, but the sampling of data is so small enough that we don’t want to put much weight on the things just yet. One of the major sources of iPad traffic to the B2B sites was news articles about the companies; without the press, the overall percentages would have been a bit lower. Along those lines, we don’t have clients focused entirely on media, but we have worked a bit with a magazine that caters to a more affluent younger customer base; about .22% of their traffic was from iPads. So, users seem to be initially using the iPad for media consumption, as expected.

More…

The data is a week old now, so I did a quick check in today to see how things were trending. I focused only on sites with at least 100,000 visits per month. The number of visits from iPads is definitely trending upward; rates vary between about 10% and as much as 18%.

How about as a percentage of mobile devices? Google Analytics lumps the iPad traffic in with other mobile devices, but I’m sure many would argue that the iPad isn’t really a mobile device. As a mobile device, it shows up in the top 5 mobile devices on most sites we looked at.

There obviously are some takeaways from this process, but still some unknowns and we have to remember we are working with a very small sampling of data. I plan on checking back in with this in a month or so, after we have a couple full months worth of data, and we can see the impact of the iPad with 3G.

Takeaways from WordCamp Portland

Published September 24th, 2009 Blogging, Ecommerce, Events, Industry No Comments

I’ve finally had a chance to put down some thoughts about WordCamp Portland, which was hosted at WebTrends last weekend. First off, what an amazing event. The group dynamic was fantastic; it was a great mix of developers, marketers, bloggers, general WordPress users, designers, and others. Second, hats off to Aaron Hockley (@ahockley), Besty Richter (@betsywhim), Dale Chumbley (@dalechumbley), and all of the other volunteers and people that made it possible. Next, props to the other sponsors for putting their money where their blogs are and enabling a stellar setup. Finally, what’s a conference without great presenters? I took away great nuggets from every presentation I attended (and watched); which I can’t always say after leaving an conference. I can’t possibly cover them all, but I want to point a few takeaways that I found the most beneficial for medium-to-large businesses using WordPress as a blogging solution, or even as their complete CMS.

Speeding Up WordPress

Jason Grigs (@grigs) kicked off the event with Speed Up WordPress, an awesome presentation for WordPress administrators (i.e. users) that outlines several methods for speeding up delivery of your WordPress content. This is excellent for those of us running heavily customized sites with many plugins, or those with high numbers of daily visitors. From database efficiencies, to caching, to image optimization, and more; I guarantee there is something in this presentation you are neglecting on your WordPress installation (unless your Jason, or maybe @turoczy now).

Scaling WordPress to the Next Level

Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), the founder of WordPress, did a Q+A session on day one that was great. I’d never seen Matt speak, and I was blown away by how engaging he was. With the growth of the WordPress empire, I really believe Matt is one of the most influential internet entrepreneurs ever.

One of the last questions Matt answered was in regards to how WordPress is being used for sites that are far from being blogs, and sites that see massive traffic. I had a similar question queued up, because as we make recommendations to some of our larger clients, regarding content management system decisions, we want to be confident that WordPress is being developed to handle the “non-traditional” things it is being made to do by users and developers. Matt’s reply to this question gave me confidence that WordPress will be able to handle the load as developers customize it more and more, and larger sites push the product.

More Takeaways

Many more takeaways from the event, here are a few:

Duane Storyey (@duanestorey) developer of WPtouch, gave a great preso on WPtouch and mobile web development in general.

Shayne Sanderson (@shaynesanderson) showed us how awesome the WP Ecommerce plugin has become, and how it can be used in WordPress MU.

Will Norris (@willnorris) on How Not to Build a WordPress Plugin, for developers (a bit beyond me, but interesting).

There were many many more awesome presentations and breakout sessions. Check the Twitter feed for #wcpdx, and checkout the official WordCamp Portland site for links to streams, descriptions on presentations, and other good info.

Get Free Bacon From Bac’n

Published September 19th, 2009 Ecommerce, Events, News No Comments

Ironically, I was fortunate enough to win one of the coolest door prizes here at WordCamp Portland, a $50 gift code for Bacn.com. Though it pains me to pass up free meat, I feel as a sponsor SwellPath shouldn’t take home such a righteous door prize. Therefore, I’m giving the code away to a lucky winner. Here’s how you win it: follow @swellpath on Twitter or become a fan of our Facebook page http://bit.ly/sp_fb. I’ll pick someone at random tomorrow (Sunday 9/20) afternoon sometime, and the Bac’n is yours. The only rule is that you have to be at WordCamp Portland, or at least have been a registered attendee. Bring home the Bac’n!

[UPDATE] Congrats to @WyattWerner on winning the Bac’n! Thanks Wyatt, everyone that “entered”, and all WordCamp Portland attendees!

Alternative Value in Paid Search Traffic

Published August 5th, 2009 Analytics, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When analyzing paid search traffic the central focus is obviously on conversions, the sale, lead gen form completion, or whatever the primary conversion event is. But this shouldn’t be the only focus, and you shouldn’t calculate the value of your paid search activity entirely by conversion rate or ROI. Here’s some other ways you may find value in paid search, and some ideas for calculating that value.

Usability & Conversion Improvement

What does paid search traffic have to do with usability? Look at it like this: paid search traffic is a random sampling of visitors that have strong purchase intent, or strong intent to learn about your offering. Those that don’t convert, as a group, provide insight into what is “not working” with your site. You should be able to ask and answer questions like these:

Are these visitors bouncing at high rates? If so, you need to start testing out some different landing pages, or take a good look at your offering.
If they aren’t bouncing, are you tracking specific events on your landing pages? Implement event tracking on any key potential actions on your page and see if visitors are engaging at all.
Beyond the landing page, are they navigating to other pages or areas of your site? Why are they not finding what they came for on the landing page? What are the common paths their taking, and where are they exiting?
Are they using your site search field, and if so, what keywords they searching for? Are they getting results? How do these terms and results relate to the original paid search keyword and landing page offering?

Answering these questions will initiate a process focused improving conversion. Use unconverted paid search visitors as a “focus group”, and look into your analytics data for their “responses” and “feedback”. You’ve paid for them to visit your site, get value out of their behavior and actions.

Email Sign-ups, Catalog Sign-ups, & Social Media Follows

Let’s suppose I’m shopping for vitamins. I’ve decided I need to start taking ginko biloba supplements again to combat the lack of sleep that seems to come with running an interactive marketing agency. Disclaimer: I have no idea if ginko would help with this, or of the actual health benefits of this product, it is just a good example. So, I normally buy my vitamins and supplements at VitaminShoppe.com or Trader Joe’s or some other grocery store. But I decide to price it out and buy it on the internet, so I search for “ginko biloba” on Google. I see a paid search ad for Vitamin World and I click through. After researching their products a bit, I decide I’m a little skittish about buying this new addition to my diet on the internet, so I’m just going to buy it at Trader Joe’s the next time I’m there. Failed PPC conversion for Vitamin World right? Maybe not, before I exit, I notice the two links highlighted in the image to the left: Email Specials and Request a FREE Catalog.

You know how the story ends: I sign up for a catalog, end up visiting a Vitamin World store in my local mall the next time I’m there, and become a lifetime customer worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars to the company. So, that’s best case scenario. But the gist of it is, Vitamin World is making an effort to keep the “conversation” going with me. While I’m not a big fan of the Email Specials link, I love the big call to action on the catalog request link. Beyond catalogs and email, you might also track if visitors are clicking through to your social media profiles. Track these actions specifically for y0ur paid search visitors and develop a value for them. This may be a more complicated equation if you have advanced analytics and direct marketing programs in place, where you can track multiple touch-points and segment customer types based on product categories; or something as simple as calculating the estimated value of an email recipient, then applying that to number of signup conversions you have in your PPC account. Now, obviously you can track these as conversions in your PPC account, but that can muddy up your PPC data. Using analytics to track the goal, and segmenting your PPC traffic out for analysis is usually a better option.

Keyword Testing & Strategy

I’ll tiptoe around this, because I’m definitely not the SEO specialist (or PPC for that matter) around here but the gist of thsi is that you can use your PPC account to test and refine your SEO strategy. If certain PPC keywords are limited in their conversions, but result in high-levels of engagement or some other key performance metric, you may decide to integrate them into your SEO strategy and target some pages for them. This is somewhat of an extension of the usability and conversion improvement section, but with an obvious focus on SEO and the value of certain keywords.

In conclusion, don’t write off your failed PPC conversions. You paid for those clicks – get some value out of them any way you can. This might mean putting in some sweat in the form of analysis, testing, or development, but those costs will likely be recouped over time, because you will never convert 100% of your search traffic.

Alternatives to Google Analytics: Low-Cost Web Analytics Solutions

Published May 9th, 2009 Analytics, Ecommerce No Comments

When I discuss web analytics options with most marketers, I find the common perception is that there are generally two options: Google Analytics, or a paid solution. Usually the paid solutions considered include Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics; not necessarily all three, but one or some of those. Now, obviously I have spoken with plenty of people that are aware of the other low-cost or free options available, and many that know of the other middle-tier solutions like ClickTracks, Unica, and Fireclick, but the “main-stream” seems limited in their understanding of what else is available in-between. I’ll touch on a few that I think offer quite a bit of value, and may offer your organization a way to get more complete analytics reporting, for far less than the cost of the premium offerings. I know most analytics consultants agree that fantastic data can come out of any solid platform, and the real value comes from how that data is analyzed and acted upon; if you aren’t employing someone to derive that value, then you might as well have Google Analytics running on auto-pilot.

Yahoo! Web Analytics

Yahoo! Web Analytics is the platform formerly known as IndexTools. About 6 months before Yahoo! purchased IndexTools, I conducted a relatively thrurough analysis of available platforms for a client, and we grouped IndexTools with HitBox, as solutions offering less capabilities than an Omniture or Coremetrics, at about 50-75% the cost of those solutions. Yahoo! has finally released the solution for Yahoo! Merchants If you run an ecommerce site, and you aren’t satisified with the merchandising reporting that you get from Google Analytics, I highly recommend you try out this solution for free, or a low-cost, in the next few months. It will enable you to establish relatively robust reporting on your ecommerce catalog. Merchandising aside, the solution has several other cool features, including enhanced demographic reporting, rich custom reporting, real-time analysis on certain metrics, and integration with the 3 major PPC platforms (AdWords, Yahoo!, and MSN).

Mint

I’m including Mint because it is the best low-cost installed analytics platform, it is not a hosted solution. There are many reasons not to use an installed solution, and some Mint users have voiced complaints about the resources consumed by having thier analytics data stored and analyzed on their web servers. However, for many intranet sites, installed solutions are often the only option, and most options are antiquated, expensive, or rigid and bland with their reporting. Mint allows you to customize your reporting with an abundance of “Pepper”, the Mint term for plugins. Beyond intranets, another major benefit of using an install like Mint is complete control of your data.

Woopra

Woopra is new, in beta, and it’s cost is yet to be determined. But I’m guessing it will be between $50 and $100 a month for the premium level. Currently, beta testing is limited to sites with less than 10,000 page views per day. If real-time analysis is important to you, you will love Woopra. The data is hosted and analyzed by Woopra, but a reporting application is installed locally on your machine. The interface is clean and dynamic, and switching between reports is very fast. Woopra has generated a lot of buzz with the WordPress community, and integrates well with the popular CMS. One fantastic feature is it’s tracking of your registered, or commenting, visitors. If you’re running a WordPress site, even if it’s just the blog portion of your organization’s site, Woopra is great to run in parallel with your main analytics platform.

I’ve left some other great solutions out of this conversation, like local favorite Clicky. The three that I’ve highlighted are excellent solutions for certain needs. Analytics platforms never seem to suit syour needs completely, so with the low-cost of these offerings, it’s great to run two solution togther. If you’re running Google Analytics on your ecommerce site, you might also consider Yahoo! to compliment that data. If you’re running Omniture on your brand site, and you have blog or forums running on WordPress, you might benefit from having Woopra on those portions of your site. Be open-minded about what is available, and don’t be afraid to add another set of tags to your site.

Magento is Doing A/B and Multivariate Testing – Are You?

Published November 24th, 2008 Analytics, Ecommerce No Comments

Magento, the widely used open source ecommerce platform, just announced it will soon have an interface to integrate with Google Website Optimizer. Magento users will be able to enter the pertinent script right into a section in the Magento Admin Panel. This of course allows Magento users to do A/B and multivariate testing on their sites, with very little effort, and no heavy development effort. So it raises the question: are you doing this type of testing on your site?

I have had the experience of working on or with numerous sites that had high-end analytics packages like WebTrends or Omniture, but they were doing little or no split testing. The cost of having these packages is only validated if you are getting actionable data from them, and you’re making or saving your organization money with that data! Magento, an inexpensive ecom platform, is now integrated with a free optimization (and analytics) platform, enabling customers like Wearport.com to make data-driven decisions and optimize the visitor experience by answering questions like “would it be better if we actually displayed the prices of these items?”

Moving along, the obvious exec is question “how much money can you save or make through optimization?” Well, let’s look at an example. I was working on a client’s site, doing some basic analytics consulting to repair some problems, and I suggested an overhaul of their product page. There were some best practices that they needed to put in place, and I had some hunches about some aspects of the layout that I thought would improve their conversion rate. Primarily this had to do with the add-to-cart button and the options (usually size and color) selection. I knew we could run some simple split tests on the layout and options, and find the one that resulted in the best conversion rate. I was fairly certain I could raise the add-to-cart rate by 5%.

At first they balked at the idea because of the costs, of course. But I broke it down for them: $20 million in revenue from your website this year, what if you could boost that 5%? Another $1 million in revenue sounded pretty good. So, using Omniture SiteCatalyst, without any of the additional Omniture tools like Test&Target, we set up an A/B test. The developer I was working with was quick and talented, making things much easier. The developer wrote a quick script to randomly display visitors either the old version of the product page, or a new version with a cleaner, more strategically placed add-to-cart button. Tracking the version in our own cookie, we ensured they’d see the same version throughout their visit, and on subsequent visits. We set up an custom conversion event in SiteCatalyst. After two weeks, we analyzed the results. We saw a 10% boost in cart-adds, which resulted in an almost 10% boost in orders!

Next, we tackled the options. Usually color and size were the two options, and they were separate drop downs; one drop down to select color and another to select size. An obvious problem with this is knowing the availability of a size/color combo. We combined the drop downs, so colors were now listed along sizes (e.g. Grey 36, Grey 32, etc.). After two weeks, a 4% increase in cart adds, and a 5% increase in revenue!

Needless to say, the client became a strong believer in split testing. There were of course development and consulting costs involved in this. But an overall 14% boost in sales more than covered those costs, not to mention the long-term value of acquiring new customers by improving the visitor experience.

So, where do you start with split or multivariate testing? Anywhere! Start small, make one educated and solid assumption, and test it out. Watch the results, and then move on to another change, or, if you were unsuccessful, modify your first assumption and try again. The critical objective is to begin to make testing part of your decision making process. Next time you are sitting with your developer, marketing personnel, or site manager, deciding what you think “looks”, “would work”, or “worked at company x” better, just remember that your visitors will do a much better job of letting you know what works.