Making the Most out of the Online Shopping Experience

I love jewelry. I take no shame in admitting that I am an avid collector and admirer, and I was more than happy to use an e-commerce jewelry retailer as the subject of my research and analysis this week. After learning more about SEO and search results through a comparison of two jewelry retailers for our class discussion this week, I was intrigued and wanted to keep digging. After doing some preliminary research, I found an interesting case study by AcquireConvert founder, Giles Thomas, on ByCharlotte, a jewelry retailer.

ByCharlotte, an Australian-based jewelry company, operates from both a physical location in Sydney, Australia, and online through a Shopify account (Thomas, 2016). Shopify is an e-commerce solution that business owners can use to host and build a store website (“Shopify,” n.d.). The platform allows business owners to create a customized storefront, showcase their products, and provide a secure checkout experience for their customers. Shopify also provides management resources, such as shipping integration, order tracking, add-ons for multiple applications, and even analytics reports. The analytics data available to Shopify users depends on their specific plan.

Call Tracking and Analytics

No matter which generation you were born in or how tech-savvy you are, sometimes nothing can beat a simple phone call and the ability to talk through your questions with an actual human being. Getting direct answers to your inquiries can save time and aggravation for you, and the ability to provide personalized help and further marketing to customers who are interested enough to call is an invaluable opportunity for businesses. Because phone calls are an undeniable part of the marketing mix for both consumers and businesses, tracking these calls is crucial to understanding the impact of marketing campaigns.

CallRail is a call tracking application and technology partner with Google Analytics. The app serves more than 40,000 businesses across North America and is continuing to grow (“Call Rail,” n.d.). CallRail is self-service, with an easy to use setup and interface for marketers who are anxious to analyze and use call data to optimize their campaigns. The app shows marketers the reality of their current marketing efforts and reveals how callers found their companies by offering the ability to “track calls from online and offline marketing campaigns, view which campaigns are driving conversions, and records calls for lead qualification” (“Call Rail,” n.d.).

Clicky - A Web Analytics Tool

 If you are going to have a website for your business, you need to have a web analytics tool. This is crucial in order to measure the impact of your organization’s online presence, monitor your traffic, better the user experience, and ultimately, optimize the ROI of your website to promote the overall success of your brand. To have a website without the ability to measure its performance is to be like “a general engaging the opposition sans intelligence” (“Clicky Web Analytics,” n.d.). While there are many web analytics tools out there to help provide the intelligence you need to lead your brand to success, choosing the right one for your business will give you the insight needed to not only optimize your online performance, but to succeed against your competitors in the marketplace.

Authentic Brand Conversation and Social Media Strategy

Social media is all about staying connected. Users opt to join Facebook to keep up with old friends, Instagram to showcase their photography skills and pets, and Snapchat to see what their family and friends are up to day by day. In a fast-paced digital world, social media is the key to maintaining relationships across continents and busy schedules. But social media isn’t just for the individual anymore - brands have flocked to social media sites in the attempt to build relationships as well. In a climate that values personalization and speed-of-light communication, marketers have jumped in to establish their brands as staples in their customers’ daily social media interactions. By creating and curating social media accounts, brands have taken on an almost human entity as they interact with customers in their digital social circles.

According to DeMers (2014), “brands who engage on social media platforms enjoy higher loyalty from their customers.” And brand loyalty is what marketing is all about – targeting a carefully selected audience segment and connecting with these users in a way that makes them not only lifelong customers, but brand ambassadors to their friends who are also part of the target audience as well. Because having loyal customers is so important to the health of a brand, every feasible effort should be made to leverage social media to help make connections with potential customers and maintain relationships with current customers. According to Erdogmus and Cicek (2012), social media marketing is “more sincere in its communication with the consumers, trying to show what the brand is rather than trying to control its image,” as is the trend with other types of carefully crafted advertisements on paid and owned media. Users appreciate this sincerity, and it is on social media where genuine brand-customer relationships can be formed. And from an ROI perspective, the higher the number of brand loyal customers, the higher the conversion rate.

Page Exit Ratio and RJMetrics

 In today’s increasingly digital world, consumers are bombarded with a slew of ads and over-saturated with content every time they go on the internet. Being able to cut through the noise and reach these consumers is getting increasingly difficult, and, as anyone involved in online marketing can testify, getting a visitor to the desired web page is only half the battle. The other half rests on a brand’s ability to engage visitors long enough to successfully convert them.

      Not every page visit turns into a conversion, however. If a visitor leaves a page before the conversion criteria is met, this can be classified as a page exit, with the “number of exits from a page divided by the total number of page views” as the page exit ratio (Web Analytics Association, 2008). While discouraging, page exits prove to be a useful metric because they provide data that can be used to improve a website and ultimately increase the website’s conversion rate. Determining the page exit ratio, or “the number of exits from a page divided by the total number of page views of that page” (Web Analytics Association, 2008), and measuring it against the company’s Key Performance Indicator for this metric is an important step in identifying what specific aspects of the website are keeping visitors from successfully converting.

Conversion and Brian Gavin Diamonds

Conversion, or the accomplishment of a “desired outcome” (Reed College of Media, 2017), is a crucial metric and a necessity for all successful online marketing efforts. Each conversion made by a website visitor propels a business forward to reaching its grander online goals and satisfying its business objectives. The building block metrics and those of visitor characterization, visit characterization, and engagement, while important in their own right, are useful to analyze because they help a business optimize its conversions, or push its bottom line. These macro conversions are crucial to measure, but micro conversions must be considered as well. According to Kaushik (2008), there are some people who “refuse to be converted online” and are more interested in pursuing goals that are not related to the business’ macro conversions (e.g., researching products to buy offline). By analyzing micro conversions, or other meaningful events not necessarily linked to purchasing, etc., a business can measure its success in all areas and learn more about the goals of its users. While there are many different types of desired outcomes for businesses’ online endeavors, analyzing visitor purchase behavior leading up to and after conversions can help optimize the online experience for both the user and the business.