Web site analytics have moved beyond tracking traffic and conversions to slicing customer data in ever-finer segments to give e-retailers not just sales data, but business intelligence that informs a broader array of decisions about their site, Fireclick Inc.’s vice president of sales and marketing Steve O’Brien tells Internet Retailer. In the case of one Fireclick client, analytics revealed that simply investing in a new shopping tool would deliver no ROI unless the retailer also figured out how to make visitors to the site use it.
Fireclick’s client, a large online retailer, was contemplating adding rotational 3-D capacity for viewing selected products on its web site. Before it invested to add the necessary software and take the extra product photos, it collected and compared data from three customer segments. One group had access to the tool and used it, the second had access to the tool but did not use it, and the third didn’t have access to the tool. Fireclick’s Netflame analytics product found that the conversion rate between those who had access to the tool and didn’t use it and those without access to the tool was identical. The conversion rate among those who had access to the tool and did use it, however, was double the rate of the others.
“Just by making the feature available, nothing would happen to the conversion rate, but if they could somehow convince people to click on the 3-D button, they could double their conversion rate on that item,” says O’Brien. “So if they spend time and money, it shouldn’t be to make sure that the button is on every page, but on making sure that people use it where they do find it. They never would have known that without analytics.”
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