eCommerce Analytics

What Google’s Remarketing Features Mean for eCommerce Sites

Doug Bright — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:42:47 +0000

Over the last few weeks Google has been rolling out remarketing features to users of its AdWords platform. These new features allow companies to continuously target visitors with ads after they’ve left its website in the hopes of luring them back. Think email remarketing but with ads on a content network.

Remarketing (often called retargeting) is not new. Dozens of companies have been offering this functionality for some time, including Criteo, Fetchback, Dotomi, and Adroll.

So why all the fuss? One big reason. Nearly every online retailer already has an AdWords account. This means the friction of setting up a remarketing program has suddenly been drastically reduced.

The Case For Google Remarketing

For many online retailers, the easiest way to dip a toe into remarketing is to do it with Google’s new features. There are no contracts to sign, no new relationships to forge, and a familiar PPC cost structure. It’s also relatively easy to set up a simple remarketing campaign that retargets site visitors with a generic ad.

Most important, the reach of Google’s AdSense network cannot be beat. No matter where your visitors go after they leave your site, you can be sure that they’ll soon be seeing an ad from Google’s network.

The Case Against Google Remarketing

The biggest drawback to using Google for your remarketing program (if you’re a typical online retailer) is the sheer scale of Google’s business. Google has to make its features appeal to every company in the world in order to make the tiniest contribution to their overall growth. They simply cannot afford to concentrate on adding features specific to integrating with e-commerce processes. Instead, Google’s business dictates that they must provide a self-service set of tools in the hopes that companies will do the heavy lifting with regards to business logic.

The result of Google’s reliance on self-service tools is that you’ll likely need a front-end developer to modify Google’s tracking code on the fly and a lot of patience for manually defining groups and rules in the AdWords interface. And if you want to integrate your remarketing program and reporting with your other systems, it’ll be up to you to do it since Google offers no professional services.

Should You be Using AdWords Remarketing?

If you are a tech savvy organization or are looking to get started with a basic remarketing program, then Google Adwords could be the perfect solution. It has familiar interface, a name you more or less trust, and solid functionality.

But if you are looking to implement a more sophisticated remarketing program or you need some expert help to guide you then you will want to look elsewhere. Like the rest of its tools, Google’s remarketing features are made exclusively for the self-service crowd.

Why Big Retailers Are Always Rotating Promotions

Doug Bright — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:17:46 +0000

Every week we look at over 500 retailers to keep tabs on what kind of free shipping promotions they’re offering. We’ve done this long enough to notice an interesting pattern: the largest retailers always have a promotion running. Whether it be free shipping, free shipping upgrade, flat rate shipping, BOGO, x% purchases over $y, or free gift with purchase, these promotions are always for a limited time. And as soon as that promotion ends, the next begins. Why?

Differentiation is Not Just for Merchandise

We know that people value things differently. That’s the core tenet of differentiation, which in turn is the basis of all marketing. While one person is willing to pay a top dollar for great customer service, another values a eCommerce site’s ease of use, while yet another cares only about quality of merchandise.

The same is true for promotions. Many people care about free shipping while others are excited by the idea of getting a free mystery gift. All, however, are spurred to action by a rapidly approaching deadline.

By rotating promotions, retailers get to appeal to all types of preferences while introducing a never ending element of scarcity. And because each promotion appeals to a different segment, there is usually no overall time-shifting of demand. Each segment delays or expedites their purchases based on promotion timing, but as long as each segment is of the same size the overall level of demand remains about constant.

What About Smaller Retailers?

Rotating promotions is less common among smaller retailers but a few merchants swear by it. Week after week we see them bounce back and forth between, say, 20% off purchases over $100 and free shipping with purchases over $100 promotions. All, of course, are limited time only. And technically, it’s true.

So if you’ve been looking for a way to add a sense of urgency to the buying decision then consider rotating two or three promotions every week. It’s quite easy to do and you might find that more shoppers end up pulling the trigger instead of leaving abandoned carts.

Cross Selling Rules

Doug Bright — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:32:49 +0000

How did you read the title of this post? If you read “rules” as a verb, you’re probably getting solid additional revenue out of your on-page cross sells and already know that, yes, cross selling does indeed rule. But if you read “rules” as a noun and want to improve the rules behind your cross sells you’ve come to the right place.

Let’s take a look at 5 common techniques retailers use to come up with cross sell rules, from least to most sophisticated. Which group are you in?

Cross Sell Sophistication Levels

Level 1: Hardcoding Popular Products

There’s an area on your site to show related items and, well, you’ve got to fill it up somehow.

Pros: Easy to do, easy to maintain, better than nothing
Cons: Poor performance, can give sites an amateurish feel

Level 2: Popular Products Within a Category

If a shopper is looking at a pair of shoes you show the most popular shoe styles. If you want to get fancy you can filter the cross sells to match the type of shoe the shopper is browsing.

Pros: More relevant than showing site-wide popular items, reasonably easy to do with just a few lines of SQL or by entering manually
Cons: Fair to middling performance, cross sell stagnation since popular items are likely to rule the roost for long periods of time

Level 3: Manual Cross Sell Rules for Each Product

This is the most common way of producing a “you might also like” area. An expert manually enters the cross sell items for each product and maintains that list as new products are added and removed.

Pros: Good relevance, good performance
Cons: A lot of work, difficult to maintain as new products are introduced and old ones phased out, risk of recommending out of stock products

Level 4: Customers Who Bought… / This Item Often Bought With…

By analyzing sales data to see which products are most often bought together you get a truer picture of how your customers think your products go together.

Pros: Great performance, shows shoppers products that have been demonstrated to go together, easy to maintain (if the analysis process is automated)
Cons: Requires SQL ninja skills, all shoppers get the same recommendations regardless of their behavior or history

Level 5: Recommendation Engine

Software or a service that crunches sales, clickstream, and other behavioral data to produce product recommendations that take a shopper’s particular affinities into account. The functionality of an eCommerce recommendation engine is usually provided by a 3rd party (like us!) in all but the biggest retailers.

Pros: Best performance and relevance, generally automated so little maintenance is required, improves over time, provides a good user experience
Cons: Can be expensive, requires setup, some engines have a “cold start” where data must be collected for a few weeks before recommendations start

Zero to 60, Slowly

Improving your cross selling performance doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you’re a level 1 you don’t have to jump to level 5 right away. Instead, find the right level for you by improving your sophistication one or two levels at a time as part of an ongoing process.

60 Seconds to a Faster eCommerce Site

Doug Bright — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:39:07 +0000

Google engineer Matt Cutts recently made some remarks that implied Google was ready to start penalizing websites that were too slow. He also hinted that it might not just be a token nod, either, and that site speed could become a major ranking factor in search engine results. So what can you do to help speed up your eCommerce site?

No Shortage of Options

The good news? There are hundreds of ways to squeeze better performance out of your site. The bad news? There are hundreds of ways to squeeze better performance out of your eCommerce site.

You’ve got a list of a million things you want to improve on your site. You can’t put them all aside to begin a comprehensive new initiative to speed up page load times. So what are the things that can give you the most bang for your buck?

Three 60 Second Tweaks

If your site uses Apache as its web server (most do) and you host it yourself you have access to 3 quick tweaks that can yield some serious speed results.

1) Enable CSS and JavaScript compression. In modern sites, CSS and JavaScript can comprise the majority of each HTML page. By letting Apache compress them before sending you’ll cut their size by up to 90%. Just ass this code to the .htaccess file in your website root directory:

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

2) Set a future expires header for your product images. If you’re like most retailers, you product images don’t change too often. Take advantage of that by allowing users to cache your product images for longer periods of time. By setting a product’s image to expire a month in the future instead of a minute or an hour you give users a snappier experience while decreasing your server load. Of course, then if you update your image and you don’t want your users to have to wait a few weeks to see the new one you’ll have to change the image file name for the browser to get it. To set a cache for your product image files, add this to the .htaccess file on your web root directory:

ExpiredActive ON ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"

The above example assumes your product images are in a directory called “products”. You’ll probably have to change that and maybe get a little creative with the FilesMatch regular expression syntax to get this just right. You can learn how FilesMatch works here.

3) Disable ETags. ETags are designed to allow browsers to check in with your web server to see if its already got a particular image or other component cached. So using them should, in theory, speed up your site. But there is some weirdness with the way that Apache constructs them that makes them not work very well for sites that have more than one web server handling the load. Unless you have just one web server or have a specific ETag caching strategy in place, you’re better off disabling the functionality since it reduces the overall number of requests a browser needs to make. To disable ETags, add this code to the .htaccess file in your web root directory:

Header unset ETag FileETag None

Time’s up

That wasn’t too bad, was it? By doing just these three things you can significantly reduce your site load time and avoid any coming Google penalty without investing too much time and effort.

Best Time to Lure Tax Refund Shoppers? You Already Missed It

Doug Bright — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:05:03 +0000

In 2009, the IRS refunded nearly $260 billion dollars by the tax filing deadline. The average amount refunded was $2683. According to a recent study by the NRF, 12.5% of Americans are eager to spend their refunds on big ticket items like TVs, cars, and furniture. Put all this together and we see that, for retailers, $32.5 billion is up for grabs in the 2010 tax refund bonanza.

Timing is Everything

When is the best time to start marketing to these newly flush buyers? Digging around in published IRS statistics for 2008 and 2009 we see that most Americans file their tax returns right before the April 15th deadline.

No surprise there. Those expecting big refunds, however, file earlier. How much earlier? Early February.

Incorporating the average refund amount into the timing of filings, we see that the real money is at stake months before “tax season”.

The Second Wave Is Coming, Twice

While there is another peak of refunds issued around April 15, one thing to consider when timing your tax season promotions is that the number of filers getting their refunds by direct deposit plummets by this time of year.

So if you’re planning on running a promotion shortly after the April 15 filing deadline remember that only half of the procrastinating group of taxpayers getting a refund will receive it by then. You should also consider running a 2nd promotion in mid May when the paper checks start rolling in.

A Do-It-Yourself Email Remarketing Script for PHP

Tyler Frieling — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:55:11 +0000

We know why shoppers abandon carts and we also know that email remarketing is an effective way to lure some of those shoppers back to complete their purchase. But how can you try remarketing to users with abandoned carts without investing a lot of time and money?

Try a Simple PHP Remarketing Script

There are a lot of good reasons to implement a robust remarketing system but sometimes there’s beauty in simplicity, especially when you just want to try something out quickly to see how well it works. To that end, we present a simple PHP script to send remarketing emails to your shoppers when they abandon carts.

The Abandoned Carts Input File

This script reads a comma delimited text file that lists carts that are currently abandoned (your e-commerce software likely has a report that creates this report or you may need to bang out a quick SQL query to do it). The file contains one row for each abandoned cart with the first element of each row being the email address of the shopper the cart belongs to. After that comes the products that were left in the cart. For example:
shopper1@yahoo.com, Item1, Item2, Item3 shopper2@gmail.com, Item1 shopper3@hotmail.com, Item1, Item2

The Script That Uses the Input File to Send Email

The php script below then sends out a reminder email to each customer in the file that shows them which items are still in their carts. You can customize the from name and address, subject, and body of the email by editing the configuration section at the top of the script.

error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);


////////////////////////////////

// Configuration

////////////////////////////////

$inputFilePath = "abandoned_carts.txt";

$delayBetweenEmails = 2; // in seconds

$from_email = "mystore@mystore.com";

$from_name = "MyStore";

$subject = "Don't let your cart expire!";

$messageBody =

"Hi there,
You left a few items in your cart last time you shopped with us:
{CART_CONTENTS}
Bad news! Your cart is about to expire! Now's your chance to snap up those awesome products. Just go to http://mystore.com/cart.php and finish your purchase in one easy step.
Thanks,

The MyStore team";
////////////////////////////////

// End of Configuration

////////////////////////////////
function getCSVValues($string, $separator=","){

    $elements = explode($separator, $string);

    for ($i = 0; $i < count($elements); $i++) {

        $nquotes = substr_count($elements[$i], '"');

        if ($nquotes %2 == 1) {

            for ($j = $i+1; $j < count($elements); $j++) {

                if (substr_count($elements[$j], '"') %2 == 1) { // Look for an odd-number of quotes

                    // Put the quoted string pieces back together again

                    array_splice($elements, $i, $j-$i+1,

                        implode($separator, array_slice($elements, $i, $j-$i+1)));

                    break;

                }

            }

        }

        if ($nquotes > 0) {

            // Remove first and last quotes, then merge pairs of quotes

            $qstr =& $elements[$i];

            $qstr = substr_replace($qstr, ”, strpos($qstr, ‘”‘), 1);

            $qstr = substr_replace($qstr, ”, strrpos($qstr, ‘”‘), 1);

            $qstr = str_replace(’”"‘, ‘”‘, $qstr);

        }

    }

    return $elements;

}
// Open the input file with all the abandoned cart info

$fh = fopen($inputFilePath, “r”);

if(!$fh){

	echo “Can’t find input file.”;

	exit(0);

}
// Iterate through each line of the file

$i = 0;

while($line = fgets($fh)){

	$errors = array();

	$message = $messageBody;
	// Split the comma separated line into an array.

	$cartContents = getCSVValues($line);
	// First element of array is recipient email address

	$recipient_email = array_shift($cartContents);
	// Replace {CART_CONTENTS} in the message body with the cart’s contents

	$cartContentsStr = “”;

	foreach($cartContents as $cartItem) {

		$cartContentsStr .= $cartItem . PHP_EOL;

	}
	$message = str_replace(”{CART_CONTENTS}”, $cartContentsStr, $message);
	$headers = “From: $from_name <$from_email>“;

	$headers .= PHP_EOL;

	$headers .= “Reply-To: $from_email”;
	mail($recipient_email,$subject,$message,$headers);
	// Sleep for a bit so as not to overload the mail relay and get flagged

	sleep($delayBetweenEmails);
	$i++;

}
echo “$i emails successfully sent.”;

?>

To use this script, just copy and paste the above code into a file and save it as email_remarketing.php (or whatever) on your web server or a server with a php interpreter installed. Then add your abandoned carts report to the same location and call it abandoned_carts.txt. Browse to email_remarketing.php in a web browser and off it runs.

Some Caveats

There are a few things to keep in mind before using this script:

This script was made to be run on linux servers. It will work on Windows servers but you have to add some mail relay info to the script (learn how here)
This script sends only plain text email but you can tweak it to send HTML email if you like
You shouldn’t send too many emails at a time with this script, otherwise you’ll run the risk of having the emails marked as spam and/or your mail relay throttling your throughput. Limit it’s use to a few hundred a day tops
This is simple, simple, simple and doesn’t contain any real management or reporting functionality.

Using a simple php script to do email remarketing is not a sexy or glamorous solution to cart abandonment but it will let you test the waters quickly and see what kind of response it drives. If you like the results you see early on you can certainly add more functionality to the script or even consider building or buying a more advanced system.

Getting Started with Email Remarketing

Doug Bright — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:10:49 +0000

Last time we talked a bit about the reasons behind abandoned carts and realized that there aren’t many weapons available to combat most of its causes. Even potential solutions that look tantalizing (showing S&H and tax on product pages) will likely just push abandonment to an earlier pre-cart point in the process.

If Nothing Else, Read These Two Stats

All is not lost, however. It turns out that remarketing to shoppers who have left full carts behind really can make a difference. Check out these two stats, pulled from the Experian CheetahMail report:

Even the most basic [remarketing] emails (even those that simply link to a website home page) pull in over 31% higher transaction rates compared to bulk promotions — a number that senior management will find difficult to ignore.

Yowza. That fact alone should should make you want to drop everything and put a remarketing program together today. But maybe you’re still skeptical. After all, won’t a remarketing email with a discount offer simply train shoppers to abandon the cart in hopes of a better deal?

Not to worry (from the same report):

Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.

We don’t even have to include a discount offer in the remarketing email to reap its rewards. Not bad.

I’m Convinced. What Else Should I Know?

Before you get started, keep these tips in mind when sending your remarketing emails:

Create a sense of urgency. Subject lines mentioning that an item is about to be out of stock or that the basket is about to expire is likely to garner a better response rate than one simply reminding the user that items are left in his or her cart.

Time it to hit the sweet spot. When is the sweet spot? Conventional wisdom says one to seven days after the user abandoned the cart. Start by sending it two days after abandonment and then test random groups using different timing to find optimal response rates.

Link directly to the cart. From the report:

The quicker a customer can access their own cart and view the actual products they were interested in, the higher the returns.

Mix it up a little. Use a recommendation engine or manual cross-sell rules to offer some related items in case the user didn’t complete the purchase because he wasn’t sure what was in his cart was what he really wanted.

How Much Time Will It Take?

Implementing a remarketing program is one of those best practices that can yield great results without much investment. If you’re ready to dip your toes in check out our next post. We provide, in usable form, the world’s simplest php email remarketing script that will get you a functioning remarketing program in a few minutes.

Top 3 Reasons Shoppers Abandon Carts

Doug Bright — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:47:46 +0000

Looking a report of abandoned shopping carts can be frustrating. All those carts stocked full of high margin items just waiting to be checked out. But the shopper bailed just before pulling the trigger. Was it something you said?

There two recent studies that examined reasons online shoppers fail to purchase after adding items to their carts. CheetahMail published statistics as part of a whitepaper in January 2010 as did Forrester in late 2009 (link to summary blog post). Both largely agree with each other. Let’s combine them and see what they tell us:

Biggest Reasons Shoppers Abandon Carts

(40-60% respondents citing as important)

Didn’t want to pay shipping costs/High shipping costs
Total cost of purchase was more than expected (read: tax + S&H)
Was doing research/wanted to compare price on other sites

Less Important Reasons

(10-30% respondents citing as important)

Wanted to look for coupon
Wanted to buy offline instead
Checkout was too complicated
Security concerns

No Silver Bullet Here

While it’s tempting to think that a streamlined checkout process can make big improvements in cart abandonment rates the data doesn’t seem to bear that out. Instead, the biggest source of control we have in getting a customer to complete a purchase is letting them know as early in the process as possible what the total price after tax and shipping and handling will be.

But won’t this just shift abandonment from the cart to an earlier point in the process when the full tax + S&H total is displayed? Unfortunately, it probably will. So we need to look at other ways to address the abandonment problem.

Remarketing to the Rescue?

Let’s take a look at how to do email remarketing — the process of sending follow-up emails to customers who left the site with a full cart. Remarketing produces surprisingly good conversion rates and can be a valuable tool in the fight against cart abandonment.

Ready to get started? Here’s a PHP email remarketing script to jump start your efforts.

Larger eCommerce Retailers Have More Loyal Customers?

Doug Bright — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:42:27 +0000

Do larger eCommerce retailers have more loyal customers than small retailers? Our data suggests maybe.

We dug through web traffic metrics for 520 retailers to see how many times the average visitor returned every month. Retailers with over 2 million unique monthly visitors have 67% more sessions per visitor every month than those with less traffic volume.

One possible interpretation is straightforward: bigger retailer = better brand = more loyalty. Another interpretation is that visitors return to bigger retailers more often simply because big merchants have a large selection of goods where customers can meet a variety of their shopping needs.

These theories are not mutually exclusive, of course. But are there other explanations that we’re missing?

You Can’t Sell Shoes Online Without Free Shipping

Doug Bright — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:25:12 +0000

You have to offer free shipping to sell shoes online. At least it seems most pure-play online shoe retailers think so.

Our free shipping list surveys 129 clothing and shoes retailers weekly. Of those 129 retailers, only these 13 offer free shipping with no minimum purchase:

Amerimark
Barneys New York
CaféPress.com
Casual Living
CustomInk.com
Kate Spade
Onlineshoes.com
Piperlime
Road Runner Sports
Shoebuy.com
ShoeMall.com
Shoes.com
The Guiltless Purse

Even though they make up only a small fraction of the clothing and shoes category, online shoe retailers account for nearly half of merchants offering free shipping (6 out of 13).

Has Zappos’ free shipping and returns policy forced competitors to drop shipping charges as well or is there another dynamic at work here?

(It’s interesting to note that, although free shipping is nearly ubiquitous in the shoe business, many merchants are reluctant to offer free returns as well. Instead they promote “easy shipping” by providing free pre-paid return shipping labels, cost deducted from return amount, of course. If everyone is forced to match Zappos’ free shipping policy, why not their free returns policy as well?)