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.
(“Reports and Analytics,” n.d.)
This past year, ByCharlotte paired Google Analytics with its Shopify website to collect and analyze data to help it meet its business objectives and to monitor traffic in the attempt to optimize the online shopping experience (Thomas, 2016). With a comprehensive free plan, Google Analytics is an obvious go-to resource for many e-commerce retailers. The information provided by its implementation of web analytics was both robust and helpful for the brand to optimize its e-commerce platform.
ByCharlotte approached its integration with Google Analytics with its goals in mind. According to Thomas (2016), the brand aimed to increase its overall e-commerce conversion rate from 2.83% to 3% monthly. The brand’s business objective was to increase sales by receiving online orders for its jewelry, and the specific goal was to increase the number of pieces of jewelry sold. Its key performance indicator would be the number of pieces sold each month, and its target was 296 sales monthly (breaking down to 74 sales weekly and 10.5 sales per day). ByCharlotte wanted to compare its actual performance to its target based on these goals, and it used Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking to do this. E-commerce tracking on Google Analytics would also use the receipt pages to give the brand detailed information about transaction details, trends in product sales, timing, and average order value, to name a few (Barker, 2015).
(Barker, 2015)
But this wasn’t the only reason why ByCharlotte wanted to utilize Google Analytics. According to Thomas (2016), the brand wanted to collect data that would reveal trends in customer behavior, and aimed to gather as much information as it could about how its users navigated the store. ByCharlotte wanted to identify distractions and pinpoint missed clicks that would have led to conversions; essentially, the brand wanted to illuminate the customer process through the store’s sales funnel. With the Behavior Flow report, goal flow, and funnel visualization, ByCharlotte would have the tools it needed to see where guests were dropping out of the conversion process and thus, be able to determine what changes would need to be made to optimize the website.
According to Thomas (2016), “what conversion optimization is really about is increasing your conversion rate and profits through a deeper understanding of your customer,” and ByCharlotte wanted to gather qualitative data as well to illuminate the wants and needs of their customer base. During Thomas’ case study, ByCharlotte analyzed the site’s live chat conversations to learn more about their customers’ questions and concerns, employed customer surveys to develop better brand positioning, and used website polls to ask questions to guests during key points in the sales funnel (Thomas, 2016). Pairing the quantitative data gathered by Google Analytics with a qualitative approach showed that the brand was interested in not only pushing the bottom line, but in learning more about its customers in the attempts to better serve them.
To add to my research of ByCharlotte’s web analytics’ utilization, I had my own personal customer experience on the website. I found the site simple but eye-catching, with a soft color palate and attractive photos of different pieces of jewelry. The navigation was clear and right at the top, as was the brand’s blog, which gave more visuals and a personal touch to the brand.
(Blakeney, 2017)
After about a minute on the site, a pop-up emerged inviting me to sign up for the brand’s newsletter. The discount offer made the subscription tempting, and I can only assume that the brand set up a thank-you webpage with a URL tracked by a destination goal in Google Analytics (to monitor new leads generated by the sign up). This is a cost-effective, simple way to market to a group of customers who committed themselves to the advertising. A carefully constructed newsletter can be a great marketing tool to potential customers who have proven themselves as an audience willing to listen.
(“By Charlotte,” n.d.)
I was surprised, however, at the absence of a telephone number for the company in the contact section. The brand offered an email address, a contact form, and a physical address for the bricks and mortar location, but there was no phone number. While this may have been strategic due to lack of resources to answer and return phone calls or because the target demographic prefers online inquiries, I did think this was odd. I would suggest that the brand provide contact information for callers and implement a call tracking application (like CallRail) to help determine the referring campaign and to gather more qualitative data about their customers from call recording and text message monitoring. Regardless of the primary preferences of the target audience, in an increasingly mobile world, many consumers value the ability to call a brand (or even better, the ability to text one)!
(“Contact,” n.d.)
After running the Open SEO Stats Chrome extension on the ByCharlotte website, I found that there were no meta keywords and only two external links within the site (“Open SEO Stats,” n.d.). With only 1,430 pages indexed on Google and an Alexa Traffic Rank of 1,473,219, I determined that the brand could definitely stand to improve its on-page SEO. By earning more links from other sources, the brand would gain more credibility from other pages and gain the attention of search engines to help increase the number of pages it has indexed (Hines, n.d.). Its title tag on the search engine results page begins with “By Charlotte,” instead of jewelry or other retail-specific keywords. Because Google “puts more weight on words found in the beginning of your tag,” brands that put a competitive keyword at the beginning of the tag usually rank higher for those keywords (“Backlinko,” n.d.). According to Thomas (2016), ByCharlotte’s top search terms are currently all brand-specific. While social media marketing and magazine features are a big part of the brand’s marketing mix, rearranging its title tag and increasing its focus on SEO could help the brand rank earlier in search results for retail-specific (rather than brand-specific) key words, and in doing so, garner more traffic, more customers, and ultimately, more conversions.
(Thomas, 2016)
References
Barker, S. (2015, October 13). How to implement E-commerce tracking in Google Analytics. Semrush.com. [Blog]. Retrieved February 19, 2017 from https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-implement-e-commerce-tracking-in-google-analytics/
Blakeney, C. (2017, February 9). One fine day wedding fair. ByCharlotte.com. [Blog]. Retrieved on February 19, 2017 from https://bycharlotte.com.au/blogs/news/one-fine-day-wedding-fair
Contact. (n.d.). ByCharlotte.com. Retrieved from https://bycharlotte.com.au/pages/contact
Hines, K. (n.d.). How to get Google to index your new website & blog quickly. Kissmetrics.com. Retrieved from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/
On-page SEO checklist. (n.d.). Backlinko.com. Retrieved from http://backlinko.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/On_Page_SEO_Checklist_Backlinko.pdf
Open SEO Stats. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/open-seo-statsformerly-pa/hbdkkfheckcdppiaiabobmennhijkknn?hl=en
Reports and analytics. (n.d.). Shopify.com. Retrieved from https://help.shopify.com/manual/reports-and-analytics
Thomas, G. (2016, April 4). How to increase your e-commerce conversion rate (Google Analytics health check). Acquireconvert.com. Retrieved from http://acquireconvert.com/e-commerce-conversion-rate-google-analytics/
Interesting post...I do wonder if they present a phone number to more localized customers...
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