Odimo revenues jump 50% with analytics-driven site and banner improvements

Odimo, operator of web sites Diamond.com, Ashford.com and WorldofWatches.com, swapped its former practice of making product placement decisions based on gross sales and guesswork with an internally-designed tool that combines analytic data collected by Coremetrics Inc. technology with shipped sales data from its backend systems.

The tool, called the Product Impressions Report, shows how many times a product is displayed on a page, how many times it’s viewed by customers, how many times it’s placed in a shopping cart, and how many times it is purchased, as well as sales, net of returns. The calculation determines product popularity: for instance, if a product is viewed 1,000 times but purchased 50 times, the system recognizes it as more popular than a product viewed 10,000 times but purchased 75 times.

The tool enabled Odimo, No. 106 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, to optimize product placement throughout its sites` home pages, landing pages and search results pages. The tool improved site merchandising by generating data that showed which products were most frequently viewed and should be moved to more visible pages, as well as which products were less frequently viewed and should be moved deeper into the site.

The Product Impressions Report also helps to optimize Odimo’s banner ad campaigns by showing how many visitors view or purchase a product promoted in a specific banner ad, and by suggesting which frequently-viewed products on the sites might be good candidates for banner ad promotion. “We had no idea if we had the right products on our banners before implementing Coremetrics and the PIR,” says Darlene Smith, senior vice president of merchandising at Odimo.

Odimo saw the 50% increase in sales for affected products in the month following the analytics-driven changes to its web site or banner ads. It continues to see a sales jump of 30% to 50% for the affected products immediately after any analytics-driven change to its sites or banners, the company reports.