Round ‘em Up

Motorcyclesuperstore.com has used analytics from WebTrends since 1999—initially, to gauge how different page and site elements performed among visitors. But it’s Motorcyclesuperstore’s more recent use of analytics to judge the performance of various marketing campaigns in bringing buyers to the site that’s shifting marketing spending now.

“We’ve been using WebTrends to track campaigns since November,” says Don Becklin, founder and president of Motoryclesuperstore.com. “We’ve been able to get a good look at what is and is not working and we’ve been able to devote more or less resources to those things as a result.”

Mirror experience

Motorcyclesuperstore.com’s evolving use of web analytics mirrors the experience of other e-retailers now looking to analytics to help them do more with their business. What started out as a way to track the performance of site features and offers among visitors who’ve arrived at the site now reaches out to track the effectiveness of different marketing programs at getting them there—an arena where some of a web site operator’s biggest ongoing spending occurs.

Analytics vendors have stepped up with functionality that allows retailers to scrutinize online marketing efforts in greater depth and detail. One example is technology from analytics provider Coremetrics Inc. that seeks to capture data earlier in the customer’s buying process instead of just focusing on the click that represents conversion, with LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) profiles that record the history of individual visitors’ interaction with a site so site operators can probe the warehoused data for marketing insights.

“It’s really providing a whole new set of tools to media planners and product marketing managers,” says Bill Parkes, senior vice president of sales and marketing technology and CMO at nFusion. nFusion is an interactive agency consulting with Toshiba on its use of Coremetrics analytics. “I’m hoping that this makes all media purchases, whether it’s search, content ads such as banners, or rich media or shopping feeds, better decisions in the future.”

The vendors lead

It’s the analytics vendors who are taking the lead in rolling out the new technology. That makes online retailers’ challenge not so much pushing developers for technology that will deliver the insights they want, but simply trying to learn to use capacity that’s already out there. A WebTrends customer for several years, Motorcyclesuperstore.com has been using analytics for campaign tracking only since late last year when it implemented the analytics provider’s newest release, WebTrends 7.

An initial round of campaign analysis has demonstrated that one of Becklin’s most successful marketing endeavors isn’t anything for which he must pay on a cost-per-click basis because it’s something that’s already attached to Morotcyclesuperstore.com: its sister site, MotorcycleUSA.com. In an industry driven by enthusiasts hungry for news of the sport, the linked content site differentiates Motorcyclesuperstore.com from competitors.

Nevertheless, Becklin has always had questions about the value of investment in it. Since November, the analytics package has delivered answers by tracking how much traffic the content site sends over to the e-commerce site, and how much revenue that traffic drives.

“It’s more than we suspected,” he says. “We also sell advertising on the content site to outsiders. Now, instead of competing with other online advertising mediums as far as cost per click or cost per thousand impressions, we have a hard view of the value. We can figure out what we can accept in the way of rates based on sales we drive to our own e-commerce site.”

In light of the new information gleaned from marketing analytics, Becklin sees the percentage of total expenditures going toward overall development of the content site exceeding growth in what he’s spending on keyword buys and affiliate marketing, though spending on those marketing initiatives is also rising, given growth in the industry. “It’s all going up, but spending on the content site is going up at a faster rate. It’s a balancing act when it comes to where we are spending the dollars,” he says.

New personalization

At the e-commerce site operated by Bass Pro Shops, analytics are about to bring a new level of personalization to e-mail marketing campaigns—one that could have the effect of boosting conversions by as much as 10% over traditional e-mail campaigns, according to David Seifert, director of operations for direct marketing.

That estimate is based on the experience of other online retailers with similar programs. But based on its use of analytics to segment offers and audiences, Bass Pro Shops’ upcoming e-mail campaigns will be a lot more sophisticated, he says.

In the course of beefing up its product recommendation engine using analytics data from Coremetrics, Bass Pro Shops decided to incorporate that information into its e-mail campaigns. It’s testing e-mails that include personalized offers that pull from a customer’s history on the site based on information that’s available from Coremetrics’ LIVE profiles of individual customer behavior. The offers will include a selection of items the customer previously either browsed or placed in a shopping cart but later abandoned. The offers also may include items from the same sub-categories the customer browsed or carted and abandoned.

That’s already a step beyond programs that populate marketing e-mails with offers that aren’t pulled from a customer’s actual history on the site, but simply represent overall best-sellers in product categories earlier browsed by the customer. Bass Pro Shops is taking it further than that, Seifert says. The personalized offers that will be sent to each customer may include items from multiple product categories and the offers are limited to items within a defined price range that corresponds with the items the customer earlier browsed or carted and abandoned. Their inventory status is automatically checked moments before the e-mail is sent out to minimize the chances of offering customers items that are out of stock.

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To populate the e-mail with relevant offers for each customer, Coremetrics will use rules written by Bass Pro Shops on product category definition and pricing to pull items from the customer’s history, and send a data feed back to BassPro, where inventory status is checked. Bass Pro Shops will then send that feed to its e-mail vendor, CheetahMail, which has designed templates that will populate the e-mails with the selected items before sending them to customers.

More specific

Initially, Bass Pro Shops is testing e-mails with a maximum of six offers pulled from as many as three product categories. The e-mails will be automatically sent to customers three days after they visit and browse the site. If customers later return within those three days to buy an item they’d earlier browsed, they won’t receive another e-mail with offers right away.

“There are other sites that are starting to kick off e-mails to customers as the result of browsing or cart abandonment, but ours are going to be more specific, and we think the conversion rate is going to be higher as a result of that,” says Seifert. He adds that Bass Pro Shops has learned that other e-retailers conducting such e-mail campaigns, but without the same degree of personalization, have increased conversion on e-mail campaigns over traditional e-mails by as much as 10%. “If we are able to achieve that or more based on the fact that ours are a bit more sophisticated, we’re going to be happy,” he says.

Tracking the shopping tail

A piece of equipment such as a laptop is a highly-considered purchase that may involve several visits to multiple sales channels over time. But historically, analytics have assigned all the credit for the purchase to the last online campaign in that process, the link where the customer hits the Buy button. “That means whoever is lowest in the conversion funnel wins,” says Parkes. “The bottom-of-the-funnel marketing activities get more accurate revenue attributions so they look more profitable, and the early-stage awareness and brand-building advertising activities get understated or not stated at all.”

Toshiba’s digital products division, which sells online at Toshiba.com, is working on a project that could change that. Toshiba previously made efforts to trace purchases back to earlier in the buying process; for instance, by dynamically presenting phone numbers tied to particular campaigns. “Even if the customer came back 90 days later, the phone number from the prior campaign would come up, so not only were we tracking online sales, but we also were tracking call center sales from the campaign,” says Nick Roberts, director of e-commerce and marketing programs.

But an increase in online marketing activity last year at Toshiba highlighted the need for a more robust tool to track the same early-campaign information and for the past six months, the company has been working with Coremetrics to develop one. The new functionality will seek to pull from Coremetrics’ data warehouse customer-specific records of their historic interaction with every campaign leading up to a purchase.

Fundamental business tool

Toshiba will use that data to attempt to weight the value of each stage. “We are hoping to turn on a new light bulb that changes the way web analytics are used to support online marketing activities, in something that will be unique to every company,” says Parkes. “What role do banners play? What’s the role of high-impact placement on MSN or Yahoo? What part do those placements play in driving the top of the funnel as well as driving through to ultimate conversion?”

Answers to those questions have a direct bearing on marketing spending and ROI, because they could place a monetary value on aspects of customer buying behavior that current analytics packages don’t. For example, according to Roberts, “laptop” is an expensive keyword whose cost can’t be justified solely on the basis of conversions directly off the term. That said, it’s an important branding word and one that Toshiba knows shoppers continue to use in searches that occur well down into the conversion funnel. With an analytics tool that tracks the behavior of customers through a succession of campaigns, Toshiba will be better equipped to justify what it spends on “laptop” and other branding keywords, Roberts says.

As online marketing has changed over the past few years, so have web analytics. Stretching beyond the measurement of site operations into campaign analysis, they will continue to pull even more accountability out of the dollars spent on online marketing as they get better at stitching together the effects of individual campaigns on each other and on the customer’s ultimate purchase.

Driving the pace of those developments is another trend: marketers’ growing understanding of analytics as a fundamental business tool that they use directly themselves, rather than viewing it, as in the recent past, as a capacity mainly under the control of IT. Increasingly, the new releases of web analytics software and services reflect that with products that are built with the end user versus a technical audience in mind. “Certainly, the whole category is moving in that direction now,” says Parkes.

mary@verticalwebmedia.com

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