eCommerce Analytics

Let’s just admit it: small retailers are the biggest abusers of Twitter. For every @KidBean there are 1000 merchants who spam their followers every day with one offer after another. But engaging in social media is different than direct email. Social media takes time and resources, both of which are in short supply at small and mid-sized etailers. So instead of engaging in conversations, the temptation is to use scalable shortcuts — shortcuts which happen to drive followers away.

Which of these Twitter shortcuts do the most damage to your budding online community? To find out let’s take a look at what a popular Twitter anti-spam tool, The Twit Cleaner, classifies as bad Twitter behavior:

1. Posting nothing but links. Posting link after link can be ok under some circumstances, but it may also be a signal that your account is nothing but an advertising tool. If you’re going to post a lot of links make sure they’re going to varied content: pictures, blogs, and other sites besides your own.
2. Tweeting the same links all the time. We get it. We should really check out your fantastic offer. Maybe we missed the first time you posted it, or the second, but certainly not the 12th. Conventional wisdom says you should limit purely promotional tweets to one in 10. One in 20 is better.
3. Few re-tweets and no @replies. Is Twitter is a one-way channel only for you? Using Twitter for eCommerce is as much about listening to your customers as getting your message out to them. If your followers don’t feel that they are being heard they may decide to unfollow you and drop the conversation all together. Or worse, they may take their conversation elsewhere.
4. Not following your followers (?). I hesitate to call this a shortcut even if The Twit Cleaner does. On the one hand, it’s important to be listening to what your customers are saying and, to listent, it helps to follow. On the other hand, Twitter users who have lots of followers but themselves follow few people are considered highly credible and authoritative. Given a choice, I’d rather be authoritative. But there is a middle ground that lets you follow your most vocal, valuable, and/or influential customers. (Fun fact: @Zappos follows 390,000 people and is widely considered the creme de la creme of retail Twitterers. @GapOffical, which pumps out nothing but promotional spam, follows 7.)

Lookout! HTML5 is coming! If you keep an eye on Twitter and tech blogs it may seem as if the whole world is talking about HTML5. Recently the chatter has gotten louder with the introduction of Google Wave (which relies heavily upon HTML5) and YouTube’s new beta support for it. But what does it mean for eCommerce?

Background

We’ve always pushed the Web to do more than it was designed to do. What began as a way to simply link text documents together has become a platform for shopping, chatting, watching videos, and kitten cuteness battles. In large part, this is thanks to additional functionality provided by 3rd party plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

HTML5 is a new standard that aims (among other things) to add native browser support for video, audio, location reporting, and new forms of user interaction that are currently the domain of 3rd party plug-ins.

How Far Away Are We From HTML5?

The group responsible for the creation of the HTML5 specification is called, for real, WHATWG. WHATWG began work on HTML5 in 2004 and expects HTML5 to be adopted as a W3C Recommendation in 2022. I originally had joke dates written to drive home how long this process takes but then I realized it’s funny enough without me having to punch it up.

In practice, though, HTML5 is starting to become a reality. Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, as well as niche browsers like Opera and Chrome, have already implemented partial support. It will be years, however, before HTML5 is supported as universally as current technologies like Flash.

Booooring. Get to the Point.

Let’s take a quick ride through some new features of HTML5 and how they will impact eCommerce:

Medium Impact Features

Video. This is the money feature of HTML5. This feature is WHATWG’s way of saying, “Beat it, Adobe, we don’t need Flash for video anymore.” But with 99.7% of browsers supporting Flash you’re safe to continue using Flash video for quite some time. There is one exception to this rule: you may want to consider using HTML5 video if mobile is a big part of your eCommerce strategy since the iPhone and iPad do not support Flash.

Geolocation. Browsers can now report a user’s location by passing along latitude and longitude information to your site. We can kind of already do this for computer users by using IP location lookups but now we can get the location of mobile device users, too. If technical innovation is a core strength of your company and mobile is part of the strategy you can probably find some interesting things to do with this functionality. If not, sit back and let your ad network, analytics software, and recommendation engine take the lead on using this new capability.

Low Impact Features

Canvas Drawing. Have you ever wanted to add interactive or dynamic graphic elements to your site? If so, you probably used Flash. You can safely keep doing that unless you’re desperate to provide the same functionality to iPhone users.

Semantics. Lots of the div tags used for page layout now have special names. But they don’t have to have special names. Eventually using the special names may have some SEO impact but not for a long, long time.

Drag and Drop Anything. Imagine if shoppers could drag any element of your site or their browser onto any browser surface! Yeah, we couldn’t come up with anything either. Someone will find something cool to do with this but it doesn’t have to be you.

Offline Storage. Websites can now store data offline within the browser itself to speed up functionality or improve usability when internet access is not available. If you think this sounds similar to cookies you’re right. The difference is that this capability is more robust and “databasey” than cookies are. While great for email and other web apps, there’s not much going on here that affects eCommerce.

Where Are the High Impact Items?

Exactly. It will take years for HTML5 compatible browsers to gain the same market penetration that technologies like Flash and Silverlight have. If you don’t need to show video or provide interactive functionality to iPhone or iPad users then don’t spend another second worrying about HTML5. What you’ve got now is perfect.

Do you think we’re totally off base on this one? Let us have it in the comments.

A well known SEO and SEM strategy for smaller retailers is to dominate niche long-tail keywords instead of competing head to head with big merchants for popular phrases. So instead of trying to rank for blu ray player, a better strategy might be to research keywords that have less competition (say, cheap blu ray player) and try to own those instead. But what happens when popular tools used for this type of keyword research have flaws that raise questions about the validity of their results?

Two of the most common tools for keyword research are free and come from Google itself: the creatively named Keyword Tool and a newer offering, Google Insights for Search. Both tools, more or less, report search volume for a given set of keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool provides an estimated absolute number of searches for a term while Google Insights provides a relative normalized value that makes sense only when compared to other terms or past data.

The problem is that the data in each tool is, more often than not, is contradictory.

Let’s consider our search for Blu-Ray players. First, here’s what the Keyword Tool has to say about the search volume for blu ray player:

The phrase match volume is 1,830,000 while the broad match volume is 4,090,000.

What does Google Insights tells us about the keyword blu ray player?

It scores the phrase match a 29 vs. broad match of 38. In effect, Google is saying that broad match volume is 224% more than the phrase match volume. But the Keyword Tool tells us that broad match volume is only 131% more than phrase match volume. This is a big difference.

It gets even worse when we get into head to head comparisons using a broad match long-tail keyword. Let’s take a look at the keywords blu ray player and cheap blu ray player in Keyword Tool:

We see 8100 searches for cheap blu ray player and 4,090,000 for blu ray player. According to the Keyword Tool, blu ray player is searched for 500 times more often than cheap blu ray player.

For the same keywords Google Insights shows:

A score of 1 for cheap blu ray player and 38 for blu ray player means that according to Google Insights, blu ray player is searched for only 38 times more often than cheap blu ray player.

The tools disagree with each other by an astonishing factor of 1300%.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Mediocre

We can’t heap too much blame on Google. They themselves say that the tools use different methods to analyze their data. They’ve also made no secret that their tools are not particularly accurate when studying low volume keywords.

But if we can’t trust in Google’s own tools using their own data when it comes to keyword analysis, who can we trust? It’s unlikely that 3rd party tools will yield better results given their reliance on sampling and secondary data sources.

Given all its flaws, Google’s tools are still the best available (certainly the best free tools available) so we hold our nose and take the results with a gallon of salt. Ultimately using Keyword Tool or Google Insights will give us a general idea of where opportunity may lie, but only real world testing will tell us for sure.

Last summer Gap Inc. dipped a toe back into brand cross-navigation, a staple of late 90s and early 2000s e-commerce design that used link bars to drive traffic to sister brands:

Gap Cross-Nav Summer 2009

Gap clearly liked what they saw because they upgraded the cross-nav’s small text only links to big bold tabs only a few months later:

Gap Cross-Nav Today

The trend caught on so quickly that it prompted Linda Bustos to document other retailers following suit last month.

Now two more big retailers have embraced tabbed cross-navigation. Lane Bryant has begun linking to their Cacique, Catherines, and Fashion Bug brands in a top mounted tab bar that is, shall we say, the sincerest form of Gap flattery right down to the shipping offer and shopping cart boxes.

New Lane Bryant Cross-Nav

Forever 21 has also gotten in on the act, adding links to their Hertiage 1981, HTG 81 Kids, and Twelve by Twelve brands. (Interestingly Forever 21 houses all of their brands in subdirectories within the forever21.com domain. Do they know something about SEO that we don’t?)

New Forever 21 Cross-Nav

What does this mean for smaller retailers?

Gap claims that the changes were the result of focus groups and a part of a larger initiative to integrate the cross-brand shopping experience. We don’t yet know, however, if the cross-nav tabs have resulted in increased conversions or average order value.

It’s also possible that Gap’s peers have made similar changes not because they drove better results in testing but because of a herd mentality that products an “800 pound gorilla see 800 pound gorilla do” effect among larger retailers.

Small retailers should keep an eye on the cross-nav tab trend but until we better understand its benefits there is no need hop aboard just yet. By all means, run a few tests to see if it produces lift conversions, AOV, or a meaningful engagement metric. Just don’t let the 800 pound gorillas make a monkey-follower out of you.

We’ve wrapped up our first look at web analytics market share among online retailers and if you’ve been thinking about ditching your current package for the free Google Analytics, it appears you’re not alone. Google Analytics is now in use by 44% of online retailers with Omniture close behind at 34%. Coremetrics rounds out the big three with 17% market share.

As expected, Google Analytics dominates with smaller e-commerce players while Omniture owns the 5 million uniques/month and above segment. Coremetrics makes a respectable showing in the 500,000+ monthly uniques segment.

33% of mid-sized retailers use two or more analytics packages — nearly double the rate of larger retailers.

Of those, nearly all are using Google Analytics with either Omniture or Coremetrics. Is this a sign that retailers are kicking the tires on Google Analytics or is it just an inexpensive way to validate the figures from the more powerful packages?

Update: The full e-commerce web analytics market share report is now available for download in PDF format.

Fun fact from a study we’re cooking up: almost 2 in 5 retailers who are using Omniture or Coremetrics for their web analytics are also using Google Analytics.

Are they using Google Analytics to verify the numbers from their industrial strength packages or are they contemplating a switch? It certainly makes sense to use a second package if you want some assurance that the numbers you’re seeing are legit, especially if that package is free. But it’s not a stretch to imagine that these retailers might be giving Google Analytics a test drive.

Bonus fun fact: over 1% of online retailers are using both Omniture and Coremetrics. That’s some serious analytics firepower. And while you may have heard of these retailers, they aren’t the household names you might think.

Stay tuned for more web analytics analytics.

For the first time since we started tracking free shipping a few weeks ago there has been a net decline in free shipping offers among retailers. This, of course, is news of the “Well, duh” variety. It is interesting to note, however, that despite the pull back more than half of merchants are still offering free shipping.

Take a look at the full free shipping list breakdown at http://istobe.com/free-shipping.html.

Will you be offering free shipping for the holidays? If so, you’re not alone. Nearly 44% of retailers we surveyed in our free shipping report are currently offering some type of free shipping in preparation for the holidays.

Of those offering free shipping, about 7 in 10 require a minimum order amount. The remaining 30% offer free shipping regardless of order size.

Office product and jewelry retailers lead the way with nearly 75% and 65% respectively offering some free shipping variant. Food and gifts retailers are at the opposite end, with only 10% offering free shipping with minimum purchase.

On average, the minimum order size for free shipping is $75.

Check out the full results at http://istobe.com/free-shipping.html. We’ll be updating these stats daily throughout the holiday season so check back often.

Also, if there are any retailers you’d like to see added to the list just drop us a comment below.

There is no question that recommendation engines work. If you’re looking for a way to boost order value, items per basket and conversions, adding a recommendation engine to your eCommerce site is pretty low-hanging fruit these days. But how do you evaluate which is the right one for you when all that black magic that goes on under the hood is so complex (and expensive)?

Recommendation engines are not rocket science (though we’d have you believe otherwise)

Most every recommendation engine provider boasts of patented algorithms and legions of MIT grads. Hell, our recommendation engine was created by 3 MIT grads (though (Course XV, not Course VI as you might suspect).  What we don’t tell you, however, is that this is more valuable for marketing than for creating a great recommendation engine.

Why?  The recommendation problem has been solved.  Most recommendation engines use one of a handful of methods that are well understood and detailed in academic literature. We all have our own little twists on the procedure, though, and this is what the legions of MIT grads ultimately patent.  The reality is that, at heart, most recommendation engines aren’t that dissimilar.

So when you’re looking to add a recommendation engine to your site, don’t worry so much about the black box powering it all.  Instead, focus on how well it meets your needs in other areas, chiefly:

• Cost
• Ease of setup and integration
• Customizability

These are the areas that cause the most headaches, though they are often overlooked by potential buyers. If you find a recommendation engine that works for you in these three areas, you’ve got a good one.  Now go add it to your site and count all that new revenue!

eMarketer has an interview up with Bill Nussey of Silverpop in which he warns against badgering customers with email marketing that is too frequent or irrelevant to their interests.  The phrase he used is to describe this more tailored, moderate approach to email marketing is “keeping it in the green zone”.

The phrase resonated with me — perhaps because the “green zone” is how we visually depict customers who are likely to respond favorably to given email content in our new product.  

Read The Email Marketing Green Zone »