What’s more important than a sale price online—credibility
Smoothfitness.com `s director of marketing Kevin French had a hunch about how changing plans for a home page promotion might change results, and analytics from ClickTracks helped him prove it. The site, the online arm of a 21-year-old business, sells only exercise treadmills, with about a dozen models for sale online.
When planning an online promotion to celebrate the company’s 21st anniversary, French guessed that leveraging its tenure as an established offline business would deliver better results than simply announcing a sale. “We believed that if we could portray trust and credibility, that would instill in consumers the confidence to make a purchase,” French says—no small matter as it’s not an inexpensive purchase: treadmills can cost a few thousand dollars. About 45% of its sales are now online, the company estimates.
While some at the company wanted to emphasize the sale itself over its 21st anniversary component on the home page display, French successfully argued for creative that emphasized the company’s 21 years, with the sale given secondary emphasis. “ClickTracks was able to show that 21% of site visitors clicked on the 21st anniversary link, and we had higher conversion from that link than from any other link on the site,” he says. “I was able to prove that we had made a good choice.”
While French says he could have gotten the same information from the company’s previous analytics vendors, he adds that ClickTracks`s reports and in particular its segmentation tool made it easier to get at the data. Smoothfitness.com, which had used an earlier version of ClickTracks, has for the past two months been a beta user of its newest software release, which launched earlier this month.
The new release incorporates new site features including a site archive function, which captures web site data at a point in time for analysis later; time-split overlays that allow site operators to view visitor behaviors on different versions of the site, representing different times, on one screen; and A/B split functionality that lets site operators compare two different versions of the site simultaneously. A fourth new feature, funnel reporting, follows visitors along the path to checkout to highlight which pages are the most effective at leading to purchases.
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