Web Analytics: Three Success Stories
With the advent and development of Internet marketing in the last 10 years, catalogers have been inundated with more data than they know what to do with, courtesy of their Web analytics packages. Catalogers shared their frustrations and success stories regarding their online marketing data at the session “Web Analytics: The Secret to Your Success” at last week’s ACCM. Below are their stories.
1. With the current version of its site active and taking orders since 2002, Classic Designs has been using WebTrends to track online marketing data since that time, said Mark Desrochers, co-owner of the woodworking catalog. But while the software had been collecting customer behavior information, Desrochers had thought of the company primarily as an offline marketer and had done nothing with the data.
It was the success of an online program, rather than a problem with the Web site, that prompted Desrochers and his team to re-evaluate the online business. Pay-per-click search had been driving significant traffic to the Web site, generating a cost/sales ratio of just 10 percent. Wanting to understand customer behavior on the site, the Classic Designs team has begun sifting through nearly four years of data collected by Web Trends to develop benchmarks for the site.
These benchmarks, which include traffic by month, user session length, referring URLs, and primary entry and exit pages, have prompted Classic Designs to focus on the Web as a much stronger marketing initiative. In addition to hiring more Internet support staff, Desrochers said the company is developing reports that initially will run every two weeks, allowing the company to compare current results to these established benchmarks and react to any changes immediately.
2. Great American Business Products has used its Web analytics platform, provided by DMinSite, to great effect, said Barbara de la Riva, marketing director for the business forms cataloger. The company began tracking both traffic and sales on the site by the media that originated the contact. These reports prompted Great American to bolster its e-mail campaign, increasing its e-mail file by a factor of 10, de la Riva said.
Another report revealed that the links clicked most often on the site’s home page were the clearance items and the best-sellers list. Combined with a deeper view of which pages customers visited from these first clicks, Great American was able to streamline its site navigation, de la Riva noted.
3. Having been on the Web since 1995, Elderhostel first started tracking its online data using Omniture in 2000, said Peter Spiers, vice president of communications and marketing for the not-for-profit educational travel merchant. Though the company had been able to track individual sessions on its site with Omniture, Spiers said that he switched to Coremetrics last year because its analytics platforms would allow Elderhostel to create profiles for each user, allowing a deeper level of insight.
While Elderhostel accepts catalog requests and enrollments on its Web site, the primary purpose of the site had always been to educate the company’s customer base about its products in an attempt to save customer service reps (CSRs) from doing the same explanation. What Spiers found, however, was that customers were abandoning the site on education pages, which suggested that more information was needed. His team added a deeper layer of program description and navigation to the site, which in turn reduced the amount of time his CSRs spent explaining Elderhostel’s programs.
