Tower Records designs by the numbers to boost the uptake on special offers
Tower Records saw click-throughs on featured offers rise by 10% to 20% and sales of the products increase proportionally after it redesigned its home page based on site visitor data supplied by Fireclick’s analytics reporting, Kevin Ertell, senior vice president of online operations, tells InternetRetailer.com.
Tower got a few surprises after installing Fireclick’s Netflame analytics tool and an accompanying product, Site Explorer, in August, Ertell says. The analytics provided aggregate data on where visitors went on the home page –and where they didn’t. “We found that we had special offers on the page where people weren’t clicking at all, or very little,” he says.
Analytics also showed that while visitors were bypassing the offers, they were flocking to search. 65% of home page visitors went directly to the keyword search function, a greater number than Tower had estimated. “We knew it was high, but we had thought there was more browsing,” Ertell says.
Tower put the data to work in a redesign. The search box was placed more prominently on the left hand side of the page to draw even more initial clicks when visitors landed on the home page, and a much larger block of real estate immediately to its right, in the middle of the page, was devoted to the promotions. “We wanted to make the promotions bigger and more obvious so you couldn’t possibly miss them, even if you were going to the site to search for a specific item,” Ertell says. Since the change was made in October, Ertell says clicks on the featured promotions have risen from an average of less than 1% to 10% to 15%, with sales on those products increasing correspondingly.
Though he adds that most of the data supplied by the analytics tools could also have been pieced together from Tower’s own internal monitoring, it was easier and less time-consuming to identify in the reporting delivered via analytics. “The picture was worth a thousand words,” he says.
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