Daniel Laws

Get Your Share of $400 Billion in Ecommerce Sales with A Product Data Feed

November 21, 2016 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Ecommerce sales are expected to grow to more than $400 billion in the next several years, with Forrester Research estimating $414.0 billion in sales in 2018 and eMarketer estimating $491.5 billion in 2018.

Retail and Ecommerce businesses continue to look for opportunities to grow and increase online sales, as well as in the store visitors. One of the most challenging things for business owners is the management of the product data feed or inventory information and availability for products online.

What is a Product Data Feed?

A product data feed is an organized list of products and their attributes. Each product can be displayed, advertised or compared in a unique way. A product data feed typically contains a product image, title, product identifier, marketing copy, and product attributes. It is often used to populate product information on ecommerce websites and shopping engines such as Ebay, Amazon, or Shopzilla.

How Can Retailers Use the Product Data Feeds?

Retailers and Ecommerce websites can use product data feeds to increase product awareness and influence purchasing decisions. Online shoppers are using shopping engines to find what they want. Shoppers are searching, browsing, and making purchasing decisions before stepping into a store. Often purchases are made outside of the merchant’s website.

How Can the Product Data Feed Help with Retail Promotions?

It can be optimized to increase organic search visitors. The product data feed provides value information on products, availability of items, shipping options, product reviews and details that are visible for search engine and potential shoppers. Also, it can be used to promote or advertise via social media, mobile apps, and generate local in-store visitors.

Use the Product Data Feed to Position Your Online Business & Retail Store

The product data feed is vital for Ecommerce and retail stores. It shouldn’t be an afterthought but an overall part of the strategy to sell more products. Customers are constantly searching for the least expensive products to fit their needs and sometimes it happens while they are in your store. Your products need to be visible and accessible in-store, online, apps, and shopping engines if you want a piece of the estimated $400 billion in ecommerce sales.

For more information on Retail or Ecommerce, check out our Ecommerce Guide, subscribe to our YouTube Channel or subscribe to our newsletter.

Combining SEO & PPC to Impact Business

October 18, 2016 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

SEO + PPC = $

Hi. I’m Danny Laws, principal owner of DaBrian Marketing Group. DaBrian Marketing Group is a digital marketing agency. We focus on everything from web design, to social media, Pay per Click, inbound marketing, SEO as well as google analytics, and we are Google AdWords partners. Today I want to talk a little about the effectiveness of combining SEO and Pay per Click and how that can impact the business. What’s some of the things I’m going to talk about at a high level specifically come from the Google partner, something that took place in New York about a month ago and I’ve been thinking about that lately as we go into the new year closing out Q4 [Quarter 4], and speaking with a lot of our clients about potential opportunities that combine the efforts of both SEO and Pay per Click to maximize their effectiveness.

With that being said, some of the things I want to give you a high level on the content, talk about strategies, specifically localized strategy, the impact on incremental clicks, performance, controlled visibility, the data (how do we leverage that data, right?), tailoring the message, and finally we want to talk about localized measurement and what that means for a business in its context. Kicking this off first and foremost, speaking of localized strategies, we want to take a look at the localized strategies for your business, including the SWOT analysis, your unique value proposition, your company’s position within the market, and look at how you formulate strategy as you consider SEO and Pay per Click together.

One of the most common things that we see is redundancy on ineffective keywords from both an SEO perspective and a Pay per Click perspective. Not only are you ranking for keywords that have low volume and don’t resonate with your target audience, but you’re also paying for those keywords and phrases via AdWords or Bing Ads, so compounding the issue. Ideally you want to avoid that. You also want to consider a mobile strategy. You’ve heard it, you’ve seen it, you’re looking at all the data, Google went, as far as mobile, making sure everything was mobile friendly, giving you accessibility, a number of tools to make sure that you can maximize your strategies and improve your mobile sites. That is going to be imperative closing out the 4th quarter, going into 2017.

Making sure that your products features and benefits are very clear to your customers. Not necessarily you, but what does that mean to the customer, how do those features and benefits translate. We want to make sure that we keep that at the forefront, and while you’re looking at strategies bear in mind that AdWords, Bing Ads goes way beyond simple elements of search. That’s Gmail, that’s display, that’s video. Think about that as you start to lay out your localized strategy. In some cases that’s a national strategy, but it’s still relevant.

The other piece of this is the incremental clicks. PPC generates brand awareness. It’s generally at the top of the page. You’ve seen at the top of the page and now you’re seeing it at the bottom of the page. In many cases that generates awareness around a product, an offering, or a brand. Some people, such as myself, won’t necessarily click on that knowing that it has a tendency to cause a customer cost per click. They’re paying for that click. Periodically what people do is simply take that organization and search for them that has an incremental lift in organic search queries sometimes by brand name, sometimes by offering and sometimes by service. You’re going to see that incremental lift when you combine Pay per Click and SEO just naturally by people’s own human behavior.

The performance; again looking at Pay per Click and SEO, the ability to measure lead generation, sales, as well as brand awareness is more simplistic than ever provided the tools, the enhancements, the analytics, the integrations that are out there. Call tracking is another variable that plays very much into the organic side, specifically for services being able to measure that information and seeing what’s happening. You can measure the performance as an overarching search campaign, and you could also measure them in isolation Pay per Click and SEO separately to figure out where the greatest opportunities are for you to minimize your costs and maximize the lead generation and achieve your goals’ objectives however you had them laid out within your overarching strategy.

The other piece here is controlled visibility. What we very often see in the space is Pay per Click versus SEO the potential number of customers that are coming and minimizing that cost per new customer, cost per new lead, cost for new sale, or new business relationship in its entirety, so there’s a lot of overlap in that area. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes that’s a bad thing where you’re duplicating efforts. There’s definitely an opportunity to control what people see based upon the content that you’re creating and the campaigns and what they’re focused on. Whether it be a geographic footprint, whether it be a specific demographic, you name it, there’s an opportunity to control what shows up on the paid search side so that you’re not cannibalizing yourself unless it’s a necessity or a critical element of the strategy. Not necessarily a good thing in its entirety, but sometimes it can work to your benefit.

The other piece here as far as this control visibility is mobile. You have this mobile component and the opportunity to create mobile only campaigns for that call and functionality or call-only campaigns to make sure that those individuals are coming through that those are hot leads, that their intent is they want something right now. You can deliver on those results creating a greater customer experience and generally leading to more profitability, which is ideally what you want to do between SEO and Pay per Click as well as your overarching marketing and business plan.

The other piece here is limiting the redundancies in keyword targets based upon psycho-graphic, demographics, intent. Those types of things, being able to isolate them and/or figure out how you have a more cohesive strategy, is definitely an element that you want to take into consideration as you’re looking to combine SEO and Pay per Click for more impact on the business. Looking at opportunities where your visibility is organically, is it where you want to be? And, substituting and/or testing Pay per Click campaigns to make sure you’re covering the ground that you need to and being competitive in the marketplace when people are looking for products and services.

The other piece that I mentioned earlier is the data, data everywhere. You’ve got Moz Tools, you’ve got Raven Tools, you’ve got SEMrush, you’ve got Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, you name it, you’ve got tools for mobile site, browsing tools, you name it, Site speed. If you can think of it, pretty much it’s a tool out there. How do we leverage that data? I want to give you one clear example. If you’re running Pay per Click campaigns, you’re running on the display network as an example, the display network allows you to disseminate banner ads in relevant locations within Google’s networks that resonate with your target audience, and in some cases, you’re going to see great results.

Finally, localized measurement. If you’re a business and obviously you’re on a national scale you want to look at what’s happening from a national perspective, but if you are a regional business, if you are a smaller mom-and-pop type of business, what is happening from the Pay per Click and SEO side specifically in your backyard as it relates to brand reach and visibility, lead generation, and/or sales? You don’t necessarily want to look at the world in its entirety when you’re looking at organic search traffic. Local traffic is mission critical.

Are you positioned well enough from an organic perspective and a paid search perspective? Are you leveraging just low-hanging fruit, meta-descriptions? Do you have geography, geography tags in there in some cases? Do you have site links in your Pay per Click? Do you have price extensions in your Pay per Click specific to the local market in that local offering? Do you have the map component associated with your local listing; your name, address, phone number? Do you have those elements consistently showcased on your paid search ads and on your site from a content perspective, as well as a metatag perspective. Are you leveraging rich snippets (schema tags)? Anything that you can do to maximize that reach and visibility from a local perspective is mission critical for your business in order to make sure that you’re getting people from your own backyard and capturing those opportunities that are most cost-effective.

In addition to that is looking at the return on advertising dollars. I’ve seen it and I’ve been on pretty much a world tour the past 4 days it feels like, but every presentation that I go to I hear agency folks talk about ROI, ROI. Not saying it’s not important, but as an agency ourselves, we can’t control every variable that’s associated with ROI, so we try to focus on that return on ads and return on marketing dollars. What did you get back on those marketing dollars? At the localized level you need to take that into deep consideration because you’re going to have a number of people come to you saying, we can create that reach and visibility, but I think we also have to make sure that we’re looking at return on ads spend at the localized level.
With that, I would say, check us out on our social media network for more content. Don’t hesitate to comment on the video and let us know what you would like to see that’s going to be more useful for you to maximize SEO and Pay per Click together as well as our digital marketing services. Any question you have don’t hesitate to reach out to us on social media as well as our YouTube channel. Thank you much. Have a great day.

5 Ways to Get Customer Insights from Google Analytics & MailChimp

August 29, 2016 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Businesses are always attempting to understand customer behaviors more accurately. MailChimp (email marketing service) provides businesses with the ability to send promotions, automated follow-up emails, and a lot more. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically connect the email marketing metrics with your website’s Google Analytics metrics to gain an understanding of what people did after clicking a link to your website. Here’s some information to help you understand the purpose and get more data to improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns through Google Analytics and MailChimp:

Implement Basic Set-up Google Analytics & MailChimp

The integration between Google Analytics and MailChimp gives businesses an opportunity to track email marketing campaigns within analytics. It goes beyond the standard email marketing metrics within Mailchimp and into the customer’s behavior after leaving the email to browse your website.

How to Integrate Google Analytics with MailChimp?

Annotate Google Analytics with MailChimp Launch Dates

In many cases, your email campaign will be opened within 48 hours after the launch. Did you notice any incremental customers on your website, new leads, or online purchases? By annotating your Google Analytics account correctly, you will be able to see any incremental activity.

A/B Test Email Marketing Campaigns with MailChimp

Email marketing campaigns are used to increase awareness of an offering or generate leads and sales. Why not test which email marketing elements are leading to awareness, leads, and sales with A/B testing? With MailChimp, you can test elements such as subject lines, who it’s from, content, and delivery time. When Google Analytics and MailChimp are integrated, an email marketing campaign that’s associated with the A/B test will be visible within Analytics too.

Create A/B Test Campaign with MailChimp

Track Users Across Devices with MailChimp IDs & Google Analytics

Your potential customers are using multiple devices (tablet, mobile, and PCs) to compare offerings or products. Track your users across devices with a MailChimp ID to see which devices generate leads and sales. You’ll need the Google’s Universal Analytics code on your website. Set-up a User ID view within Google Analytics. Add the MailChimp ID to the links within your email campaign. Finally, send the User ID to your Google Analytics.

Create a Custom Dimension in Google Analytics for MailChimp User ID

The User ID is not a dimension in Google Analytics, so you’ll need to create a custom dimension for your reporting. Again, you’ll need to use Google Universal Analytics. Go to the Admin section within Google Analytics and click on “Custom Definitions”. This will allow you to access “Custom Dimensions” to name your dimension and Scope. Go to “Custom Dimensions” to name your dimension and Scope (hit) to create it.

I only touched on the capabilities for integration between Google Analytics and MailChimp here. I encourage you to implement these and see how it impacts the top of your email marketing campaign funnel (delivery > opens > click> website > conversions). Send me any thoughts or issues that you’re having with Google Analytics, MailChimp or your email marketing platform.

4 Things You Need to Know About Google Tag Manager

July 5, 2016 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that makes it easy for marketers and IT professionals to add and update website tracking codes – including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and social media – with just a few clicks and without the need to edit your website tracking code. Google Tag Manager provides businesses with control of the tracking codes, usability for marketers and IT, the ability to share information with specific users’ permission, and integrations to measurement marketing code like Facebook. Tag Manager captures the data that can lead to better ROI, a reduction in marketing costs, and a lot of time saved for your team!

Below are 4 things you need to know about Google Tag Manager:

1. You Need a Measurement Plan

A measurement plan is a document that translates your organization’s goals and objectives into metrics so that you can keep track of your website and marketing. A measurement plan provides a framework for the configuration and implementation of digital marketing strategies on your website. Without a measurement plan, there is no structure for a tagging implementation strategy. There is no way to verify that you have the necessary information to measure your goals and objectives!

2. One Tracking Code to Measure Marketing Initiatives

With Tag Manager, you get one tracking code to measure your website and marketing initiatives. This consolidates all of your data into one location to foster better decision-making based on that data. There are tagging templates and integrations to combine tracking codes from Facebook, LinkedIn, AdWords, Google Trust Stores, and more. Just one Google Tag Manager code will increase your website speed and improve your customer’s online experience on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.

3. Google Tag Manager works for Web & Mobile Apps

Your Google Tag Manager tracking code should be added to your existing website code. As mentioned in the previous section, this Google Tag Manager code will work on responsive websites (for desktops, tablets, and mobile phones). Specifically for mobile phones, the implementation of Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps is done with Firebase SDK. Firebase is a Google tool and infrastructure that is used to build better mobile apps and grows businesses by developers. Firebase SDK works for both Android and iOS to track behavior and actions that are specific to mobile apps and indicate success for businesses.

4. Better Measurement of ROI with Google Tag Manager

Too often, marketing and IT professionals work to get a website and mobile app live while neglecting to identify how they plan to measure success. With Google Tag Manager, both marketing and IT professionals have the ability to create and capture metrics that are needed to determine success as well as improve upon that success. The accessibility of integrations and templates make it easier to collect metrics within a single console. Overall, you get better data, better metrics, and better decision-making with Google Tag Manager. This means more money in your bucket and less time and money wasted!

Check out Google Tag Manager resources or contact DaBrian Marketing Group today!

Tips for Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting with Google Analytics

March 14, 2016 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting with Google Analytics

Good morning. My name is Daniel Laws, and I am the Principal Owner of DaBrian Marketing Group, an advertising agency in Reading, PA. I’ve been fielding a few questions around Enhanced Ecommerce reporting with Google Analytics. Today, what I want to talk about is exactly that, Enhanced Ecommerce reporting with Google Analytics. What I’m going to address today is what it is, and first and foremost, how is it different from the existing reporting that’s there. Also, how do you set it up? When you should set it up, where to set it up, as well as who needs to be involved in setting up those elements. Why you should care. What’s the value for your business for you to have those pieces set up.

With that being said, I’d like to kick this off with a little bit of information. Don’t mind me. I’m looking at dual screens here where I’ll drag a few things in, and obviously try to show you what I can. Obviously because of confidentiality with some of our clients and showing you their Google Analytics, can’t necessarily do that, but I’ll do my best to make it as informative, and give you the appropriate resources, and also load this information to our blog so that you might be able to get links directly to the assets. With that being said, I’m going to kick this off. Bear with me one moment while I share my screen. First and foremost, what I want to talk about is what is Enhanced reporting. With that being said, we’ve got Enhanced reporting. What you can see here is Enhanced reporting is going to give you more granular information than what you would get typically from Google Analytics as it pertains to shopping behavior, performance behavior, sales, product performance, sales performance. Those types of components will be more informative to you.

I’m looking for the screenshot here of something that’s actually going to be of value. What you can see here in this particular area is that it’s able to give you information as far as shopping activity, where the abandonments are happening simply from the shopping behavior components, as far as adding things to the cart, abandonment from cart, abandonment from checkout, those types of pieces. It can give you more information as well but at a high-level, I think one of the things that you’re going to be able to see … I know you’re going to be able to see is the shopping behavior, as well as a number of other items that will help you to make better business decisions around what sales items are working, perhaps identifying opportunities to fix the site, what have you.

How is this different from AdWords Shopping? From an AdWords Shopping perspective, you’re going to get high level information as far as clicks. You’re going to get information as far as Ecommerce revenue, conversion rate, those types of things, cost per click, to be a little bit specific. It’s going to give you some of those components if you’re running shopping. Obviously, this is a blank scenario. That’s why I used it in a test environment, so to speak. Obviously, it’s going to give you that type of information within the reporting, which is uniquely different than what you’re going to get from an overview of shopping behavior types of components. Now, what we’re looking at is shopping related information, revenue affiliates, campaigns, transactions. Those types of things are going to populate within the shopping. As you can see, it’s rather different than the other components.

The other piece of this is how do you set it up. I think one of the best resources that are out there are … Obviously you’re going to want to go to the Enhanced Ecommerce reporting section. Again, I’ll put this link towards the conclusion of the video. You’re going to want to get that information around Enhanced reporting. How you set it up can be complicated. I don’t want to say it’s very complicated, but it can be complicated in some scenarios. You want to make sure you have the most up to date analytics component there. What I mean by that is if you take a look, if you’re not on the most up to date Google Analytics version, if you’re not on analytics.js, you will run into issues and will need to migrate. Again, this is the information that’s there. You’ll need to migrate to that. You do have two options. You can migrate in an existing component or you can create a new property. In most cases people are going to want to have some of that historical data, be able to look at it in one fell swoop. The migration can become a little bit cumbersome in order to make that happen. Perhaps at a later date I’ll be able to shed some light on that for you as well.

You want to make sure that you have a measurement plan, first and foremost, before you go on this. Why are you doing what you need to do in order to capture this information? What metrics and KPIs? How are you going to troubleshoot and validate everything that’s there? Looking at some of those high-level components within the measurement plan … I’m not going to get into the details. If you haven’t done or looked at a measurement plan, I would recommend that you take a look at Google Analytics Academy, which gives you a high level overview of a measurement plan and how to break that down. Make sure that you have all those metrics, those elements, goals and objectives lined out prior to implementing the Enhanced Ecommerce reporting with Google Analytics.

When should you set this up? In most cases, people are already going to have some type of data already established, some campaigns, things that you’re already doing. I would say as quickly as humanly possible. The reason why I say that is it’s going to shed some light on a number of different areas, as I eluded to earlier, and perhaps help you to identify some low hanging fruit. With that being said, you want to do it now. If you can’t do it now, do you schedule regular updates for Google Analytics in order to roll out new capabilities? When you roll out those updated capabilities, I think that is when you’re going to want to take a look at updating the code and implementing the necessary components.

The reason why I say that is that it goes back to what you’re going to want to enable first and foremost, the tracking capabilities in itself and turn on Enhanced reporting. One of the prerequisites for this, as you can see here, is to turn on that particular element. That is inside the Admin Console. Due to confidentiality, obviously, I won’t show you that right now. If you want to go to that particular area, you go into Google Analytics. You go to Admin, and then you navigate to the view area of Ecommerce Settings, enable that particular piece, and that should be able to help you with some of those elements. Obviously you want to save, and then you want to implement the appropriate tags. That’s where it goes back to the Google developer components of what needs to be there and establishing that plug-in. It’s a great resource for that type of information as far as impression data, product data, and action data, as far as what needs to be required within updating that code.

Perhaps the other option for when you should set this up is when you roll out new products, new site features, whatever it might be, is incorporating that into that roll out if you can’t get it out now. You’ve heard me talk a little bit about the code, and updating the code, and what do you need, and those types of things. The other piece of this is who needs to be involved. To some degree you’re going to need somebody with some programming skills, familiarity with Google Analytics code, so a web analyst or someone who can obviously read through some of the material and the reference materials within the guides, and assist with those elements. In general, that’s going to be a programmer, somebody with familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, CSS if necessary. That’s generally not often required. It’s usually JavaScript, HTML code, PHP, those types of things, depending upon what your site is built on.

Where does this information go? Obviously, what you need is a site, as I eluded to before, you need to enable this inside your Google Analytics as I showed you before. You’re also going to want to have access and administrative access to Google Analytics when you bring the necessary parties involved. You may opt to implement this from a Tag Manager perspective. For the purposes of right now, I would say test it, get it up in the test environment. If you have the appropriate Google Analytics configuration, you’ll generally have an unfiltered view, a master view, and in the test view, I would say get those elements up and running first and foremost. If you’re going to use Tag Manager, make sure that you’re utilizing something within a test environment with Tag Manager to populate that information. When I say Tag Manager, I’m referring to Google Tag Manager specifically.

Why should you care? Number one, it integrates with your Ecommerce site, which is uniquely different from the shopping campaigns. The shopping campaigns and AdWords are very specific to you utilizing shopping campaigns via Google Analytics, no more no less. With the Enhanced Ecommerce Shopping, will allow you to gauge opt in opt … Not necessarily opt-in but abandonment rate, check out issues, sales performance issues, as it pertains to your Ecommerce site without running a campaign in its entirety, or without the necessity to have to run a campaign, if that makes sense. With that being said, it gives you an opportunity to improve revenues, increase revenues, identify broken processes that are impacting conversion rates. Why are people abandoning the shopping process? Why are people not putting items in the cart? At the same time, identifying ways to improve the average order value and the efficiency of your marketing. Where does the efficiency of your marketing come in? Comes very much so into play with internal promotions, and order coupons, and being able to get that information within Enhanced Ecommerce reporting with Google Analytics.

One of the other pieces of this, as I eluded to, is obviously the checkout, the shopping behavior, the checkout behavior analysis, their performance, product performance, sales performance. There’s also the internal promotions, order, and coupons just to name a few others that are going to provide you with information on what is working, what products are moving, what sales are performing well, do you modify things, and being able to collect that information based upon the measurement plan that I had mentioned earlier, and looking at those core metrics and being very focused on the goals and objectives to be able to pull out those insights and to do something about it.

With that being said, what’s the value to your business? The Bottom line is this information is going to help you to increase sales and revenue. It’s going to help you to improve marketing efficiency. It’s going to help you to prioritize items that are going to impact growth. One of the things that we often see is you have business owners that are running their business themselves and are handling their Ecommerce site, or working with a vendor directly, or they’ve got a marketing manager that is all encompassing. You’ve got a huge organization where not all of the pieces are connected. Where do you prioritize what’s going to have the maximum impact on the business?

By implementing the Enhanced Ecommerce reporting with Google Analytics, it gives you the opportunity to prioritize that information more specifically, look at those low hanging fruits that can impact revenue and growth, and to make sure that you can allocate time with things that are going to have the maximum impact, as opposed to trying to tackle everything. In most cases, there’s a lot to tackle from an Ecommerce perspective. We’re talking about SEO. We’re talking about advertising, paid search, banner ads, shopping campaigns, remarketing, a number of different things from an Ecommerce perspective, and retail perspective is everything from inventory ads.

Where do you prioritize your time? I think by enabling Enhanced reporting, it gives you a little bit more visibility into that. It gives you better metrics and allows you to justify advertising spent. Listen to me again, allows you to justify advertising spent. Many times we’re spending money on SEO. We’re spending money on pay per click. We’re spending money on email campaigns. We’re able to see what’s generating revenues, what items are being bogged down. You can slice and dice that data by segment, by marketing tactics so to speak, whether it’s the source medium. From a Google Analytics perspective, allow you to slice and dice that information and look at that shopping information very specifically.

With that being said, what I’ll do is I’ll load some of these resources to our blog when the video is live, point you in a right direction. Perhaps at a later date, we can get a little bit more granular on implementation of the code. Maybe we’ll get our buddy, our resident programmer webmaster here, Brett, to actually walk through some of those components for you. With that being said, thank you very much. Hope it was useful. Please let us know if we can add anything else of value. Thank you very much.

Resources:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6014841?

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3455481?https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/

6 Ecommerce & Retail Store Metrics to Improve Sales

February 1, 2016 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Put Your Retail Metrics & Ecommerce Analytics Into Context

There are so many metrics to help businesses improve sales, but there is so little time for the VP of Marketing or Sales. Let’s take a look at a few retail marketing metrics or ecommerce analytics to help you gauge success and improve your sales in-store & online. I recommend that you look at these metrics in the context of your product categories, marketing tactics that lead to visitors, geography, and your types of customers.

Sign-ups or New Accounts to Grow Your Customer Base

The growth of new sign-ups and new accounts gives you an opportunity to nurture the customer relationships and to ask questions to improve the business’s ability to cross-sell or up-sell your existing customer base. It will give you more details on the demographics new accounts or new customers. Ask in-store and online customers to sign-up for your newsletter, coupons, and notifications on upcoming ecommerce promotions or retail store events.

Coupon Redemption Rate for Insights & Sales Revenue

You are offering customers discounts, coupon rates, or rebates but are they redeeming your offerings? Improving the redemption rates will provide insights into which incentives lead to more (profitable) customers, in-store visits, online visits, and increase overall sales revenues. You will also discover whether or not in-store or ecommerce discounts lead to higher average order/in-store purchase value. If you don’t already know the answer, run a test to gather the information to identify which components are helping to increase your revenue.

Percent of Assisted Revenue Contributing to Market Share (dollar)

Assisted Revenue is monetary value of sales a channel (Direct, Email, or Organic) assisted in earning the sale. You want to know which marketing channels are contributing to the business’s revenue to guide the marketing budget allocation and future decision making. For example, if a customer initially comes to your website via paid search and later purchases directly on your website, you would attribute some of the sales to paid search as well as direct traffic. By identifying the marketing channel that is increasing the market share, you must use the information to evaluate opportunities to grow the market share while increase profitability. Start using the data import features within Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics for a complete picture of your retail marketing metrics or ecommerce analytics.

Average Order Value or Value Per Transaction for More Sales Revenue

You will generate more sales revenue by increasing your average order value or value per transaction. In addition, you will have insight into the Product SKUs and Product Categories that are increasing the overall value per transaction. With information on Product SKUs and Categories, you can make recommendations to increase your profits and return on investment (ROI). Identify the best mix of products to maximize your profits.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate for Better Conversion Rates

You worked hard to get a new account and have given the new prospective customer a coupon, but the product is still sitting in the shopping cart. Reducing your shopping cart abandonment rate means more sales and revenue. So, work to get better conversion rates by identifying the sale process and simplify the process for your customers.

Conversion Rates That Go Beyond Just Transactions

You always want to increase sales transactions, but consider the process that customers take before making a purchase. It often includes downloading some information, clicking on product reviews, signing up for a newsletter, sharing a product via social media, searching onsite for product details and more. You can and should capture this information as a conversion or an event, both online and in-store whenever possible. Have an internal discussion on questions the business has and the metrics that help you get answers.