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Google Analytics and their comical take on checkout abandonment
At Trinity, we are HUGE proponents of testing and optimizing the checkout process to maximize sales and minimize friction within an eCommerce transaction.
Recently, Google Analytics (Trinity is a certified partner) published a video that provides a comical take on this aspect of online retail.
Worth 3 minutes of your time for sure. Enjoy!
The eCommerce metrics you must track
Web Analytics can be an amazing technology, but also a highly under-utilized one. Complex deployments and integrations frequently leave business users befuddled. Without dedicated staff to analyze, analytics packages more often than not collect dust.
This brief is focused on outlining the 7 most important web metrics to monitor within your eCommerce business and what to look for as it relates to your website’s performance.
Bounce rate
First on our list is the most important metric you will encounter: bounce rate. Think of bounce rate as a first impression. The definition of bounce rate is the percentage of users that leave your website after only viewing the initial page that was presented.
Bounce rate is so vital because it provides details into how you initially message your value proposition to the customer or prospect. It provides a cue to also help you identify performance issues with your site that may be causing the inflation the metric.
Bounce rates vary by industry, but eCommerce businesses should focus on getting the metric below 30%. Especially important within paid search campaigns, bounce rate will provide valuable cues into which product assortments and promotions at the category and sub-category levels of your taxonomy are doing well. This knowledge can be leveraged across the business in other categories and implemented via multi-variate testing deployments.
Email Capture Ratio
The next metric you want to track is your email capture ratio. As an online business, you probably sell some type of tangible product or service in which you monitor orders or completed information forms. Most businesses monitor their standard conversion rate, but few businesses frequently monitor their email capture rate and take a proactive approach to increasing.
With eCommerce conversion rates yet to eclipse an average of 3%, 97% of users who come to your store are leaving without buying something. Just because they are leaving however does not mean they are not interested in communicating on some level with your business. By gaining an intial step of trust through the capture of an email address, you are not only increasing the size of your house list for future marketing but you are also building a relationship with your customer and can win their business by providing them solutions to their lives.
Strive for a 7-10% email capture rate and place the sign up tool prominent in the header. Too many businesses bury their sign up tool and do not leverage rich applications that can use browser technologies such as ajax to expand a capture field over standard text in an overlay fashion.
Number of non-branded organic keywords
Make sure you look at number of monthly non-branded organic search keywords. When monitoring SEO performance, you need to first strip out the branded terms that correlate with your business. Thats traffic that you would have received without effective SEO. Then look to the number of remaining keywords that were utilized to make up the balance of the remaining natural search visits.
Why is this important? Because SEO is driven from the long tail. Sure, core SEO terms are nice but you need to capture the 4 and 5 word queries that make up the majority of Google queries each day. Long tail placements are acheived through proper site architecture and quality targeted content. Simply put, the more terms that people are using to find you, the better your site is doing in content development. Aim for a 5% to 10% increase each month within non-branded search keywords as you structure your SEO campaigns.
Shopping Cart to Checkout “Step 1″ Progression Rate
Our next metric directly correlates to the transactional process. Make sure you monitor your direct progression percentage from the shopping cart to checkout step 1. See how many of your users are bailing for price shopping and/or they see a promo code box on your site and they are going hunting for one. This type of behavior dramatically impacts your conversion rate and overall profits and steps should be taken to measure and reduce.
Consider adding the promo box at the end of the transaction for non-affiliate sessions in order to reduce leakage. Use a cookie from an affiliate or potentially a URL to trigger two versions of the cart page. By incorporating checkout abandonment tools that re-market via email, and aggressive banners both internally and externally to try and re-capture the lost transaction, eCommerce businesses can pull prospects back in the sales funnel.
Browser and Resolution Percentages
Dont forget about looking at Browser/Resolution percentages (types and sizes) when scaling your eCommerce business. Lace face it, when you sell online you are in the “looks professional…is professional” world and goo design can make even the smallest retailer seem large. If your build your site and it breaks in Safari (Mac’s browser), or the navigation breaks on Firefox 3.5 on a PC, you essentially shoot yourself in the foot.
Look at the varied browsers and resolutions that are being used to view your website. Conduct full cross-browser testing, on varied platforms, to fully notice any potential usability problems that arrive.
Average number of cross/up sells added per visit
If you are an eCommerce business, you already know that intelligent merchandising is a crucial key to success. A primary metric to help you understand performance within online merchandising is that of average cross/up sells added per visit.
This datapoint associates to your cross sell tools that integrate at the product and the cart level and measures the average number of cross-sells added to the cart per visit. The number will provide details into the effectiveness of your product recommendations and if the recommended products are actively engaging and persuading customers.
It is tough to provide a benchmark statistic for this metric since products can vary so greatly in terms of pricepoint. But look at your historical performance and consider automating this component through algorithmic third party solutions.
In conclusion, web analytics is a complicated tool only when you let it be. When mining your data, consider the business need and goal before running the reports. Doing so will help you leverage your analytics in ways you never considered and help drive incremental ROI online.
Looking for more info? Contact us about our ecommerce consulting and web analytics consulting services
The frustrations from 36 different data centers
Being in the SEO space, I must admit that one of the most trying things to deal with is the ever changing order of search results. More so than in years past, on highly competitive terms, we see daily and sometimes hourly fluctuations of the SERP’s and the positioning of businesses within the Google results.
Clients ask why this happens and the short answer is that Google has approximately 36 different data centers that serve as search indexes for their website traffic. Depending on time of day, geo location, and other factors that are not well known, your results for a search query will probably be different than mine. Do a search for “mortgage rates” and you will see a different mix each and every day. This is partially driven from the dynamic nature of the term, the competitive factors relating to the term, as well as the different data centers across the country and the globe.
If you are dying to see your position across all centers, you can do it at SEOChat.com at their multiple data center tool. I recommend not to get to caught up however and just concentrate on the broader metrics instead of one holy grail term.
Don’t follow the no follow tag
So last week at the SMX advanced conference, it was revealed by Google engineer Matt Cutts, that the no follow attribute that is leveraged by numerous SEO’s, does not provide the ability to sculpt page rank as it did in the past.
For those who are not familiar with the no follow attribute, it is is a HTML element that was created to combat bog commenting spam back when blogging first gained popularity within the Internet community. In the eyes of Google, the tag was always leveraged as a mechanism to not pass page rank, and the tag was leveraged by search engine optimization agencies in a way to pass higher concentrations of page rank to more important pages within a website.
The no follow attribute did work well in many instances. in e-commerce businesses, it does not make sense to pass page rank to the pages such as privacy policy or shopping cart page. The no follow attribute allowed webmasters to concentrate a higher degree of page rank to the more important merchandising pages, and hence these important pages were able to move up in the search engine rankings.
The no follow tag gained popularity within the SCO community, and Google itself publicly came out and discussed the uses of the tag and how Google would interpret the tag within their search engine algorithm. After Google gave its stamp of approval, the no follow attribute became a tactic leveraged by a plethora of SEOs and agencies across the country.
Things have changed a bit after last week’s SMX advance conference. Matt Cutts on a panel discussed how the usage of no follow will be less effective in disturbing page rank within updated algorithm changes. Because of this, SEO’s across the country are scrambling to remove the no follow tag with concerns that could negatively affect search engine positioning.
If you use no follow tag on a limited basis, on pages such as privacy policy, otherwise known as an “overhead page”, then you likely have nothing to worry about. On the other hand if you have used no follow tags to eliminate navigational sections, and used it to seemingly shape your own flow of page rank in the manner you see fit on your website, then you might want to take your foot off the gas and remove the attribute from internal navigational links.
Sculpting page rank is not necessary if you structure your website properly from the beginning. Establishing an information architecture that has naming conventions that are based on the most advantageous search phrases for your organization, provides you the best possible chance to acquire natural traffic for your target marketplace.
Speed and its role in the user experience
Even with the increase of bandwith that is made available with new cable and internet providers, I still frequently experience high load times for eCommerce businesses and Content Management Systems. You would think that the extra bandwith would start a downward trend in terms of load times, but it seems to not be the case.
The reasoning? Design practices and code pushes that are not completely optimized. Most open source systems, such as Magento for eCommerce or Joomla for content management, are preset with numerous elements of Javascript and database calls that are really not necessary. By disabling these components and by properly configuring compression settings on a server, you can get through the initial performance hurdles of these awesome applications.
Lets not forget how important speed is within the conversion equation. Between site search, checkout, product page design, promotions & mechandising – SPEED can be overlooked in site improvement efforts.
Sometimes all it takes is a great tool to assist an IT team in isolating improvement areas and driving metric increases from speed.
Here’s the best free one so far. Its called Pingdom, and literally provides a visual chart, almost like a poor mans GANTT Chart, of all the page elements and the time to load. This tool will show you the total number of URL calls that your page will make, the size of each call, the total number of objects and the breakdown of those objects.
No tool that I have ever seen, at least for free, provides this great information. Definitely worth 5 min of your time for a review…
The killer app has arrived…
So not sure if you have tried it yet, but I must say that the new Netflix technology that allows the integration of a user playlist/movie queue with your Xbox live, for live home streaming, is one of the best recent achievements that I can think of within the Internet business world.
Seriously, how cool is this? At work I can go through Netflix’s offerings for “Instant” choices and coordinate content to be rendered through my Xbox Live account (which in most times is already owned) and streamed at my leisure. The content comes through crystal clear and there are a plethora of HD titles to choose from.
Netflix does two things here to really stand out. One, they offer a HUGE selection of movies and TV shows for people to choose from. Doing that, and doing it at no cost, was a great way to help the consumer in an economic downturn, and will ultimately build increased loyalty from their customers.
Also they made it EASY. So easy. This is something that a non-techie person can do fairly easily. Like the 40 something Mom with the 10 year old son who already has an Xbox live account.
Kudos to Netflix for their great application. What a great and innovatove partnership with Microsoft. Going back and seeing season 1 and season 2 of The Office is going to be a good time…
Quick fixes within product pages
Later in January, Trinity will be attending the Internet Retailer web design conference that is taking place in Miami. The focus of the show is to present varied opinions and examples to how a user interface can be presented within an online retail environment.
As part of the show, I am providing free consultations for paid attendees of their online store. As part of this process, I always look at the layout of product detail pages, and I am never suprised at the low hanging fruit that many online retailers have as it relates to this portion of their user experience.
Here are some quick tidbits of what you can identify as problems in your product pages, as well as some potential solutions.
Problem #1. Price below the fold
A biggie! Users come into your store primarily from long tail searches, especially if you have an extensive number of pages within search engine indexes. In these cases, most long tail traffic first lands on a product detail page.
Because of the limited attention span of a web “browser”, who is looking for price details primarily, by not showing the price immediately you are potentially losing visitors who bail immediately.
Solution: Bring the price above the fold and next to the product description. Make sure that the user sees the picture, short description, price, and add to cart button…all above the fold.
Problem #2. Location of cross sell items
Some online retailers see as high as 15% of total revenues from cross sell additions, some as low as 1%. The difference? It comes down to relevancy and location. If you are an established online store, consider implementing a dynamic solution that provides cross-sells based on clickstream and product data.
Solution: Be sure to test the presentation of the cross sells at varied locations within the product page, to gauge the difference in add to carts, total $ value per visitor, and total cross sell additions. You can always use multivariate testing tools to help in running your tests.
Problem #3. No reviews
Users crave real people perspectives. With new free solutions on the markeplace such as Power Reviews, there is no reason why any eCommerce store should not have the ability to capture, moderate, and present reviews. It may be a little work added to the management of your store content, but ultimately it will benefit your business in terms of engagement and conversion…assuming of course that you will get glowing reviews of good service!
Solution: Check out power reviews to see their latest offering and services models. Integrating reviews will be a great decision, trust me on that.
Some free/low cost web tracking services that are a must-see!
So I am a big fan of Google Analytics and Trinity Insight is an authorized Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC in analytics circles). Besides offering a great solution at no-cost, Google Analytics made web analytics easy and this was a driver in getting both awareness and usage across mainstream U.S. businesses for web analytics.
The key behind GA is the simplified user interface and speed for which reports render. The system is built in flash, and is a great example of a new technology driving better insights within Internet Marketing.
Well it seems that Google’s efforts, as well as the macro-trends that associate with analytics usage, have led to a run of competitors in the free or low cost analytics/web information space. After taking a closer look at some of these offerings, I thought it would be helpful for our readers to get awareness into what I see as the winners. Most of these companies are using new technologies like flex and ajax to make these apps more slick and fast.
Here are the top three finishers…
Bronze Medal:
Clicky is a analytics tool that is built within AJAX and unlike Google Analytics, the web data is presented in real time. This is a great way to help protect versus site outages, versus seeing it 8 hours later with GA.
Clicky also provides much more detailed metrics relating to user behavior as it happens. The system shows what visitors are in your site, from what country, and how they found you, but in an individual presentation. This type of information is similar to what a business can extract within certain live chat offerings.
The report offerings are much less sophisticated than Google Analytics, but for a CEO type, the offering is easier to navigate with the simplistic links at the top of a browser. Last but certainly not least is the fact that the API vault is open with Clicky and companies can create their own cool applications with this data.
Silver Medal:
If you are in Search then this is something you should check out. One of the hardest things to do within SEO is properly evaluate current positioning across multiple keyword themes and be able to FORECAST where a theme is headed.
Similar to the stock market, where trend analysis using moving averages is vital to assessments, Enquisite offers toolsets to gain moving averages within SEO targets. You can export your search data and do this is in Excel, but hey who really has the time for that?
Also cool within Enquisite is the PPC Assurance offering that allows paid search advertisers to assess fraud and other errors within PPC. Any experienced paid search marketer will tell you that if you go to a search engine with a legitimate complaint about click fraud or mis-calculations, and can back it up with data, then you have a great shot at getting a refund on those clicks. Use this software to do this for you.
Gold Medal Winner:
Very innovative. Essentially Crazy Egg provides free heat map type tools to understand click distribution for usability questions.
Varied heat maps exist in the analytics space. GA’s “overlay” leaves some things to be desired and Omniture’s plug-in based model that integrates with Site Catalyst has not always been the most effective as well.
Crazy Egg provides a solution to run in parallel with either Omniture or Google Analytics. Offering a free and paid versions, Crazy Egg provides click data in overlay, list, heatmap, and confetti (?) form.
Ok, I’m with you that the sword election of confetti might be a weird choice by the Crazy Egg management team, but you need to see how this interactive application works! Essentially all clicks show up on the analyzed page in the way of colors, and these colors map to an incoming traffic parameter (ex. Direct or Google). This can be clicked on or off by an analyst.
This provides great insight into how varied channels are performing as it relates to individual page click tendencies. This type of information is critical for your landing page tests in PPC and Email.
Hope everyone is having a great summer. Football season is right around the corner!
Copycats abound in the search business
Is it me or is that it seems Yahoo and MSN just sit back and watch Google’s application development and marketing and then essentially put out their own offering of the product/service in an attempt to get users to use their offering. Instead of being innovative towards their webmaster tools and products, the “other” two search engines just seem to take a back seat, unwilling to invest the capital and embrace the risk that is associated.
First it was Yahoo’s purchase of Index Tools, a good mid-market analytics application. Index Tools could potentially be more robust that the current Urchin platform that is used by Google Analytics, because of the already established bid management tools. Rumor has it however that Yahoo is not going to go down the same route as Google did by making the software free. This I feel is a tremendous mistake.
If the goal for Yahoo is to either gain more data on advertisers, or educate advertisers into site & marketing performance so that they spend more, then the focus should be mass integration (i.e. getting as many users as possible). To get businesses to integrate the Yahoo analytical tags on their site, Yahoo has to position their data as an alternative to Google, but they can not lose fact of the fact that Google Analytics is and always be free, and even a low cost paid alternative will likely have very slow adoption.
Microsoft on the other hand is trying to get a slice of the market for which Google’s webmaster tools owns. For those who may not know what webmaster tools is, in a nutshell it helps websites understand the way a web crawler sees them. Webmaster Tools allow a user to see crawl rates, broken links, create sitemaps, and gain visibility to the overall “health” of the website.
Because Google likes clean code, and has put out so much information to the SEO community about the importance of the indicators in the toolset, it has to be a vital part of site maintenance and management.
Microsoft’s alternative is much less robust and has a ways to go to catch up with Google’s offering. It seems the real goal of the effort is to attempt and get businesses to provide their Geo-location data so MSN Live can provide the type of local search results that Google provides today. If I was Google, I wouldn’t be too concerned about this latest challenger as well.
Open Source Ecommerce Systems – Why staying in house for technology makes sense
In the last 6 months, I have been closely paying attention to the development and maturation of Magento Commerce – the latest and by far greatest open source eCommerce solution. After implementing it on a few development domains here at Trinity, I quickly realized that this solution is head and shoulders above OS Commerce – the long standing king of open source eCommerce platforms.
Even in a standard installation, with no customization from a technology perspective, I was blown away at the level of functionality that is provided. Here are some snapshots of what this software can provide.
- Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products
- Free Shipping Option
- Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts
- Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing
- Landing Page Tool for Campaigns
- Search Engine Friendly URL’s
- URL Rewrites
- Recently Viewed Products
- Recently Compared Items
- New Items Promotional Tool
- Up-sells in Shopping Cart
- Cross-sells on product pages
- Send to a Friend for all visitors, or registered users only
- Send Wishlist to a Friend by Email or RSS
- RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags
Wow. I know many enterprise level platforms that do not have this type of functionality. Most impressive to me was the ajax based cart page that allows a user to progress through a transaction without having a page load as well as the guided navigation functionality that is allowed to be customized through the back end by aligning attributes to the taxonomy.
What is a bit of a challenge at this stage is finding developers for the software. Being that is so new to the marketplace, you have to hunt to find someone with experience.
I highly recommend loading the software on a domain and having some fun with the customization capabilities. If you want to see it in action, and view the homepage UI with an integrated multivariate testing solution (google optimizer), check out Skateboarding Direct
SEO and Affiliate Marketing – Links are getting naked
Ok, so you probably have absolutely no idea what I am talking about from the title of this post. Don’t worry, hopefully after reading the rest of this, you will gain a better understanding of a new development within affiliate marketing which is going to change the dynamics of search engine optimization.
First, lets look back in history. Affiliate links (ie links from other sites to yours within a advertising network) did not typically help natural search rankings. Typical affiliate links would go straight to a link network (ex. http://cj.com/t_a.php?id=00292282) and get re-directed to your site. Because of the tracking parameters within the URL string, as well as the fact that the incoming visit was based from a re-direct, affiliate programs did nada in helping out merchants in organic search efforts.
One company has changed that however. A company called Link Connector has created a technology that allows affiliate programs to be executed by code that is installed on the server of a merchant. No longer, does the re-direct need to take place from the affiliate network.
Their technology is called “naked link technology” and essentially allows a web publisher to use a query free outbound link (ex. www.trinityinsight.com). Code on the merchant side when the page loads, communicates affiliate details with Link Connector and drops the cookie on the user.
What does this have to do with SEO? Well for starters, your affiliate campaign is going to assist in link building. A website can dramatically improve the speed for which a link campaign is being conducted by using Link Connector. Link Connector has signed some high profile companies lately such as American Greetings, Gunther, and Wordtracker. Their publisher network is likely far behind CJ and LinkShare, but their technology makes it worth it to engage.
If you are considering a affiliate program for your marketing efforts, consider Link Connector. You will be literally killing two birds with one stone… Well ok, maybe not “killing” your link building efforts – but it will be a great supplement to traditional efforts.
Comparing GA to the paid analytics solutions
Many of Trinity’s clients are new to the notion of tracking web analytics and are unfamiliar with how analytics can help the overall growth of their business. In working with clients, many times we are in the position of recommending and implementing a web analytics solution that is going to meet their needs. We always come to the question – Go with Google, or go with a paid solution…
When making the decision of which way to go, the first step is to understand the level of analysis needed. If the business just wants top line reporting on marketing campaigns and content effectiveness as it relates to the conversion funnel, then Google Analytics will be more than adequate. Google Analytics (previously known as Urchin for those new to the analytic world) provides a on-demand tool to track and monitor your key metrics. It is a great solution for mid-size companies and businesses who are new to analytics.
If your business is more proactive in leveraging analytics internally within your organization – Omniture may be the best bet for you. Due to its flexibility in constructing custom path analysis reports – Omniture provides a level of speed & insight that is un-paralleled in the analytic marketplace. Look for Google to try and become the market leader in this space by incorporating these type of dynamic capabilites, but until then, Omniture is still the king of the web analytics market.
My thoughts from eTail and Shop.org
Its been a crazy last month. Catching up with old friends and making new ones is always a good time and this year’s Shop.org first look and Etail West was no exception.
It seems like the new “hot” thing in Ecom these days is flash and flex technology to provide a seamless experience for the shopper in both browsing & ordering. When saying seamless, I am trying to convey that pages are not reloading but rather its just one continuous flow throughout the store experience.
Im not sure however that the mainstream consumer is ready for these types of sites. Humans by nature are creatures of habit and we are hard to break of those habits, especially when we are comfortable. These new tech vendors who are promoting their technologies as the next big thing have to realize that both retailer and vendor adoption will be fairly slow. Retailers are going to be apprehensive in leaving the standard Home – Category – Sub Category – Product Page progression and consumers will need time to truly embrace flash within an eCommerce environment.
Flash can be great to utilize for merchandising at the category level, but having a complete site in flash can be a challenge at the Analytic and SEO level. Finding solutions to these hurdles is something Trinity is looking into right now – stay posted for more info…
Tags
<a href=http://www.technorati.com/flash+seo rel=”tag”>Flash SEO</a>
Google Wireless
I admit that I am getting a little sick of writing about Google on this blog but I must say that the latest development out of Mountain View is going to completely change the Internet and search advertising.
For those who dont know, Google has launched a free service called “Google Wireless” within San Diego. Essentially described as a community outreach program, Google is offering free web access to everyone in the city. The catch is that the viewing must be done through a google interface that displays advertising relevant to the user’s path/clickstream.
What Google has done is that they have purchased fiber lines that were liquidated from the dot com bust and have built a network infrastructure that can support millions of users in California. This model is no doubt going to expand to other metropolitan areas as Google continues to buy fiber in an effort to expand this program.
If Google expands this program to other major cities, they are essentially going to be owning the user experience for a significant portion of the Internet. This will not only allow the media giant to gather a wealth of information about you and I that they will utilize in their further R&D but they will also expose every visitor to adwords listings no matter if you are on Google.com
An interesting development to say the least. Likely a few years out, but other MSN and Yahoo must understand the ramifications if this program expands.