How Walmart Uses Web Analytics

As customers continue to surge toward online media and channels, marketing spend is fast following. In fact, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has reported that 62% of marketers will migrate TV ad dollars to digital video, believing it to deliver more positive return on investment (Kaur & Jain, 2012). While research shows that digital ad spend is still a relatively small percentage of overall marketing mixes, its share is growing at a fast pace and the market leaders are moving very quickly. It is clearly not just a part of the “experimental budget” anymore. And Forrester forecasts that by 2016 advertisers will spend as much on interactive marketing as they do on TV advertising today (Kaur & Jain, 2012).

CMOs need to be steadfast in their pursuit of accuracy and accountability for each dollar spent. Now is the time to start building the infrastructure and analytical precision to measure digital. CMOs cannot afford to wait. Building effective digital measurement takes time and it will become an increasingly critical competency. Marketers cannot just wake up tomorrow and expect to have the capabilities in place to deal with it as it grows. It is time to build an intelligent and privacy-friendly strategy for bringing key customer-level digital interactions together in one place with offline interactions and transaction data. The only way to break down the silos is to connect the data. It is that simple. And that complicated.

“Web Analytics is the science and adeptness that leads to drive change for websites to increase their profitability by cultivating a customer’s online experience. It is science because it uses statistics, data mining techniques, and a methodological process. It is an art because the analyst has to draw from various pallets of data sources to find the impeccable synthesis that will yield actionable insights” (Kaur & Jain, 2012).

Walmart.com has used Omniture Inc.'s SiteCatalyst service to study the relationship of merchandising to sales on the site at www.walmart.com. They currently generate roughly 60 million unique visitors (Site Analytics, 2012). They rank number 2 in the competitive rank, with Amazon.com being 2,Target.com right behind at 3, bestbuy.com at 4 and kmart.com at 5 (Site Analytics, 2012). With the use of SiteCatalyst, what Walmart was trying to determine and influence is product conversion -- what kind of merchandising translates to the largest conversion (Khan, 2004). SiteCatalyst mined data in real time to quantify and visually reflect the effectiveness of Walmart.com and its marketing objectives. Accessed online and customized, it required no hardware or software installation (Khan, 2004). For Walmart.com, the two main issues under analysis were product placement or exposure and merchandising. Unique to Walmart.com, SiteCatalyst used data points like history activity and current activity to compare and find similarities. This custom insight identified factors about site visitors, generating customized reports on such online activity (Khan, 2004).

Walmart.com was also able to use similar custom insights to analyze information on a campaign basis. Walmart’s online marketers wanted to know how a product sold by category and by campaign, and correlating all this data for numerous items let Walmart.com place a value on each campaign variable like "How well did the promotions work the week after Thanksgiving?" and "How well did my 150-by-90 banners convert? " (Khan, 2004).  The goal is always to deliver analysis in a way that makes the data understandable to Walmart.com executives including daily access to SiteCatalyst (Khan, 2004).

When it comes to SEO, Walmart generates a lot of traffic via inbound links. In 2011, Walmart averaged about 48,000 inbound links per month, 10 of which were from highly authoritative pages like the New York Times and oracle.com (Kaur & Dain, 2012). Walmart wins the SEO award with its varied and detailed descriptions for each subpage. To maximize effectiveness, pages' meta descriptions should be both keyword-rich and informative about what visitors will find on the page. Marketers should also be aware that it is important to remember to stay under the character limit in these descriptions so search engines like Google do not cut them off prematurely.

One downside to Walmart's SEO strategy is that there is no official blog. Studies show that companies that blog get 55% more website traffic on average than those that do not (Kaur & Dain, 2012). If Walmart is searched in a search engine, the reader is met by a slew of third-party blogs and negative posts about Walmart and competitive retailers. Having a well-maintained blog that helps rank in search engines could offer these businesses a way to downplay negative, third party reviews and fuel goodwill. Walmart has also comfortably embraced the "social commerce" since people have been talking about "social", but it is fast becoming a reality. Referrals to ecommerce sites from social networks are quickly increasing, and traffic is money. People are turning to social networks more and more to decide on what to buy, and the businesses that are on the forefront of that trend will reap a windfall.

Walmart has quite of bit of growth potential in the generating ecommerce from social media sites. Walmart recently launched a new analytic strategy that included the addition of an enhanced semantics search engine, Polaris, for both of its ecommerce and m-commerce channels. The objective of Polaris is to deliver more meaningful results when Walmart.com shoppers enter keywords in the site's search field, and it does so by using a constellation of methods that consider the shopper's relevant interests and thereby intuit his or her intent in doing the search (Ross, 2012). The system does not merely match keywords to terms in a static index. Rather, it attempts to decipher the meaning of queries. For example, a search for "denim" would return ecommerce listings for jeans because "denim" and "jeans" are related concepts. Items that other consumers have searched for and clicked on, as well as items generating buzz on social media sites, are all considered before the results are returned. The software infrastructure allows for the search engine to determine based on a shopper's social media interactions that they would be more apt to purchase a gourmet brand of coffee if just entering the keyword "coffee" (Moss, 2012).

References

Kaur, P. & Jain, D. (2012). Web Analytics — The Soul of Digital Accountability. Retrieved on December 9, 2012 from, http://www.sapient.com/assets/ImageDownloader/1380/WebAnalytics.pdf

Khan, A. Wal-Mart Measures Factors in Web Sales. Direct Marketing News. Retrieved on December 10, 2012 from, http://www.dmnews.com/wal-mart-measures-factors-in-web-sales/article/83178/

Ross, R. (2012). Walmart.com’s Improved Search Engine Powered by Social Genome. Retrieved on December 10, 2012 from, http://www.retailwire.com/discussion/16260/walmart-coms-improved-search-engine-powered-by-social-genome

Site Analytics. (2012) Walmart.com. Retrieved on December 10, 2012 from, http://siteanalytics.compete.com/walmart.com/

Google Analytics' Goals and Funnels

Google Analytics gives business owners and marketers alike the ability to measure, track and analyze trends seen during visitors’ experience with their website. A goal conversion speaks for itself. It is the actual completion, the desirable outcome; of the goal business owners have set for their sites. An example would be obtaining subscribers to a weekly email newsletter. The conversion of this goal would be to get users to the “Thank you for signing up for our email newsletter” page. Google Analytics can track visits to this page (a page only accessible by signing up) and will translate them into a goal conversion rate—the percentage of visits to a site that resulted in a conversion to one of the set goals. Using GA to set this goal will not only track the number of goal conversions, but will ultimately bring business objectives to life.

For the Web Metrics for Dummies blog, the best Google Analytics goals to implement and analyze are: a) page visits, b) visitor duration and c) video views. I not only want to know how much traffic is being generated to my blog, but I want to know how long they are engaged on a post or all posts. I am also interested in seeing if the video clips are providing any incentive for people to watch and stay on the blog longer. These goals are newly added so only time will tell just how well the work for understanding visitors. 

Setting up such goals will allow me to measure conversions on this blog. A conversion occurs when a visitor accomplished a desired goal on a website. Goals can vary and can be as simple as viewing a specific page on a website or completing some type of process such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product. By defining specific goals for a website or blog, the reach can be measured as well as the influence it has on people who come visit.

Once traffic is generated to an e-commerce website or a blog and measuring, managing and optimizing the traffic sources is in progress, attention should then be focused to the website or blog content. What page do site visitors arrive? Do they find the information they want when they get there? What steps are taken to measure this and improve site performance? Content should be changed based on results to better engage visitors.

Google Analytics’ funnels can go hand in hand with setting goals for conversion. Funnels may be implemented to capture the path that visitors are expected to take on their way to converting to the goal. Defining these pages would allow me to see how frequently visitors abandon goals, and where they go. This may help determine why people are exiting off the funnel and allow for changes to keep them on track. Multi-channel funnels imply a funnel that is entered from one of several different sources. This is much the way a visitor arrives at a website. They may get there via an organic search (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), a paid search (clicking the paid ads on a page somewhere), or a referral from another source that links to the website (which could be a directory, a chamber of commerce, local association, or other source). The visitor could also come directly to the site (by typing in the address, clicking on a bookmark, etc., a link in an email, etc.).

“A website has a funnel, or perhaps a bunch of funnels, where you can measure what enters the top and leaves the bottom of the funnel. Entering your funnel would be your site visitors who, we’ve learned, come from search, referring links, emails, etc. What comes out of the funnel are leads, sales, newsletter registrations, v-card downloads or whatever you’ve created to advance your business proposition” (Salchli, 2012).

Perhaps, as owner of the blog, goals and funnels may reveal the following reasons for low RSS or email subscriber count: 

·               Slow loading time of the blog

·               Low frequency of fresh content

·               Badly positioned RSS subscribe button

·               No call to action for subscribing

  

The important thing here is that goals give numbers and values, so that businesses and/or bloggers can precisely measure the percent increase or decrease of the given business objective of concern. Most website goals are to generate more leads; however, visitors that become leads typically spend more time on a site and view more pages than those that do not. Businesses should think of time on site as a precursor to a lead. The more visitors hanging around a site for longer and longer periods of time, the better.

After goal values have been running for a number of weeks, there are nice graphs showing in the analytics package, but what can be done with the data? What would be the best thing to change first? Should it be testing a call to action since that has a clear connection to the bottom line?

If a rounded analytics strategy does not exist, then a business leader will not have a solid understanding of how campaigns perform.  In addition, if the important mechanisms are not in place to easily see how visitor segments perform, then important questions could go unanswered.  That is not good for enhancing website business. It is important to recognize that anything goal-related within Google Analytics involves the strategic direction of business objectives. Leveraging goals and conversions well with Google Analytics will lead to greater understanding of how people are experiencing a site and will help leaders make informed decisions on how sites should communicate. After all, it is not enough anymore to just have a website.

References

Salchli, F. (2012). Achieving Business Results With Google Analytics. Retrieved on December 3, 2012 from, http://www.duoconsulting.com/whitepapers/achieving-business-results-google-analytics.