Web Site Measurement Hacks

Know How to Use Retail Analytics

While not exactly a class of its own, web measurement for online retailers entails fairly specific uses of the tools and hacks described in this book; knowing how and when to leverage these tools can significantly increase your ability to market, merchandise, and sell.

Learning how to use retail web measurement applications may equip you to sustain the double-digit growth you have become accustomed to as an online retailer. Pouring additional dollars into your marketing budget might also do the trick, but web measurement offers an inexpensive and easy way to achieve quick wins that can translate into additional sales, more active customers, and marketing cost savings.

Retail web measurement applications leverage most of the web measurement concepts, tools, and hacks you already know; extend a few of these items to better address specific retail scenarios; and apply the resulting measurement approaches and nomenclature to a fairly straightforward set of objectives:

• Attract highly qualified visitors

• Convert these visitors into repeat customers

• Generate more sales

• Do all of the above with less (fewer marketing dollars, less time, etc.)

Start with a simple retail web measurement framework that includes the following analyses. Even if you have already performed an analysis of your checkout funnel and managed to increase completion rate by a few percentage points, this hack introduces two additional exercises you can quickly perform to improve your site’s ability ...