Planning your ecommerce business on known, cyclical, seasonal peaks such as holiday seasons is sound practice but something as unreliable as the weather is another thing – weather forecasting is also known as horoscopes with numbers!

One of our clients sells upmarket eye wear.  Whilst analysing their Google Analytics data, ‘gut feel’ started to hint at some weather related factors influencing sales. There were signs of correlation between temperature, rainfall and revenue metrics.  Look at this graph based on weather data and revenue figures – the data has been manipulated for privacy reasons:

It ‘feels’ like hotter weather offers better sunglasses sales. Isn’t stroking a pretty graph a bit like gazing at tea-leaves to run a business? For sure! We need something stronger. Enter Pearson’s Product Moment Coefficient…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence#Pearson.27s_product-moment_coefficient

This intimidating sounding beast is actually a pussy cat given that most decent spreadsheets (OpenOffice) offer some sort of correlation coefficient function. Basically, comparing two sets of numbers, the formula returns 1 you have a positive linear relationship – when one variable goes up, so does the other. -1 means when one variable goes up, the other goes down, a negative linear relationship. 0 means the two sets of variables are independent, there is no correlation. The closer you are to 1 or -1, the stronger the correlation.

So, having removed data outside the 95th percentile, dropping in the values for sunglasses revenue and temperature by day yields a correlation coefficient of 0.32 indicating a positive linear relationship is present but not strongly so. With rain vs. revenue though, it looks as if the two data sets are more or less independent but with an expected lean towards a negative linear relationship of -0.15.

Although, not shown on the graph for clarity, when we plumb in the sales revenue for regular prescription eye wear with rainfall and temperature data, the correlation coefficient is much stronger than for sunglasses: -0.45 for temperature and 0.62 for rain.  Rainy, cooler weather yields stronger performance for prescription glasses rather than sunglasses.

Whilst these values are not absolutely conclusive due to small data sets, they demonstrate how we can apply statistical formulae to operate with greater sophistication, accuracy and precision compared to ‘gut feel’ when looking at external influences on our client’s businesses.   Be advised that when investigating relationships between two sets of data:  Correlation is not equal to causation; it is only a requirement for it. This means that even though sunglasses sales correlate to a reasonable degree with temperature, sunny days do not necessarily make customers buy high fashion eye wear.  You still need a great site and to market it well!

This small case study demonstrates a small set of the techniques that we have used to deliver strong performance gains to our client by combining our marketing, testing, design and technical expertise.

Our analytics team have been working with Sony Music to implement a new Google Analytics tracking system for their Brightcove video players. The new system tracks all video plays regardless of which website they’re shown on and rolls-up the data into a user friendly set of reports.

Sony Music have tens of thousands of music videos for their artists running across websites throughout Europe.  They needed an accurate an effective system for measuring and understanding how that content is watched and consumed.

Some of the artist websites that will be using the new Google Analytics system on their videos include Sade, Beyoncé, Kesha, P!nk, Susan Boyle, Foo Fighters and Michael Jackson.

If you’d like to learn more about using Google Analytics to track your video content or Brightcove players please get in touch.

• Awareness – making your recipients aware of your products and your company
• Consideration – promoting tangible benefits and accelerating interests in your products and company
• Cross selling – stimulating interest in additional products or services you provide using cross selling
• Loyalty – enhancing the relationship with your recipients and extending your customer lifetime value

Wow! 90% of readers use email to engage in and determine the value of a relationship with a company*

Using recognised email marketing and Google Analytics techniques, we produced conversion driven email marketing campaigns resulting in an 18% site conversion rate, generating tens-of-thousands of pounds in revenue and an additional revenue stream to the business.

Email Marketing Techniques

Open rates, open rates, open rates (using Split Testing)

Email marketing is all about getting your message to be read.  If your message isn’t read, it won’t convert.  Split testing was used to maximise the marketing reach directly impacting product revenue and our client’s bottom line. Factors including time of day and what day to send email were also taken into account – these directly affect open rates and revenue.

In a nutshell, email split testing works by testing a percentage of your mailing list, setting a timeout to gather results (based on set criteria) and sending the winning version to your remaining contacts.

Wow! 21 percent of all emails are accessed up to three months after they are received!**

Follow-up campaigns are key to success.  By combining commercial leverage (special offer) and urgency (limited time offer), our client’s email marketing benefited immensely using structured follow-up campaigns.  Check out the graph below demonstrating a second spike in both revenue (higher than the initial send!) and visits.

Designing, building and testing a conversion driven email

Designing and building a conversion driven email is very different to that of a standard website build.  Most email client’s block images, so the build of HTML websites compared to HTML emails is already very different.  Consider the following: should you really put your main call to action and selling points in an image if most email client’s block images by default?  If you really need to do this – are you using ALT text as an image fallback?

Understanding the importance of testing in all the major email client’s instantly reinforces brand image and identity.  If your email looks broken, the impact of your campaign is reduced dramatically.  Who is going to take you serious if you can’t even get an email to look correct?  That’s pretty basic, right?

Bounce processing

Bounce processing is extremely important for any email marketing campaign.  Maintaining a high level of data integrity will allow you to analyse data with far greater accuracy and spot trends and insights you might not necessarily get with an inflated data list.  Periodic bounced email processing was carried out for our client contributing towards greater email deliverability. Various Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) regard repeated emails to non-existent addresses as spamming or harvesting.  As a result, you could get banned from sending mail!

Google Analytics Integration

As Google Analytics authorised consultants, Webexpectations integrated Google Analytics with our client’s email marketing campaign to analyse the performance of traffic throughout the site.

Wow! The use of web analytics to target email campaigns improves revenue by nine times***

The technical setup

Using Google’s URL builder you can configure Google Analytics to track aggregated email traffic.  By combining this with advanced segmentation and custom reporting, KPI’s including revenue and user engagement metrics could be reported on and delivered within seconds of logging into Google Analytics.

Results

Email marketing is still regarded as one of the best online marketing methods around (if carried out, planned and dispatched correctly).  In one particular instance, check out how much better it was!

• Ecommerce Conversion Rate: 389% better than the website average.
• Average Order Value: 20.95% higher than the website average.
• Per Visit Value: 492.22% higher than the website average.

If you would like to add an additional revenue stream to your business or enhance your relationship with your customers using email marketing, contact us today and we will be happy to help.

Credits; book resource: Email Marketing – An Hour A day.

* Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels

** Zinio

*** JupiterResearch

Like several of the UK’s best known brands, The May Fair Hotel’s E-Commerce team understand the power of an intensive web analytics campaign coupled with multivariate testing.

They’ve commissioned ConversionWorks to run a series of multivariate tests across their website aimed at increasing conversion rates. It’s early days yet but after a rigorous review of their web analytics we’re confident that improvements can be made to deliver a more persuasive and profitable website.

Interested in learning more about multivariate testing and conversion rate optimisation?

Watch our webinar with Google or read more about how our four step optimisation process

Boutique hotel specialists Mr & Mrs Smith had this exact problem. If they could accurately link their offline sales with their online marketing activities they would have a much clearer idea of what marketing delivers sales.

The result? More accurate analytics leading to better decisions on where to invest crucial marketing budgets.

ConversionWorks helped Mr and Mrs Smith plan an offline analytics solution that was simple and easy to implement.

“The solution was simple and yet really effective, within a matter of weeks we were able to track all our offline conversions accurately and link the data back into our web analytics.”
Tamara Heber-Percy, Marketing Director
Mr & Mrs Smith

If you have lots of offline conversions or telephone orders contact us for advice on how to better track and understand your offline sales.

“The APA is committed to helping our members to measure the effectiveness of online branded content. Thanks to ConversionWorks, we were able to provide our agencies with practical measurement and analytical skills so that they may demonstrate maximum ROI to their clients.”

Amanda Davie
Head of Digital, Association of Publishing Agencies

Companies that attended produce websites for some of the UK’s best know brands such as Asda, Orange and Aston Martin.

“We really trying to equip agencies with a better understanding of how to use web analytics properly – that doesn’t mean printing off a report once a month and giving it to your boss. Web analytics should be about improving the conversion rate of your website and the ROI it delivers for your business.”
Russell Sutton, MD at ConversionWorks.

If you would like to find out more about using web analytics to improve the conversion rate and profitability of your website then speak to an expert today.

• Increased conversion rates
• Lower cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Improved return-on-investment (ROI) from your online advertising budgets

Google Conversion Professionals (or GCP’s as they will be known) will use the latest analytical and site optimisation tools to get real actionable insights into client’s websites. In practice this means convincing more of your site’s visitors to act and convert e.g. buy, get a quote, sign-up etc.

Russell Sutton, MD of ConversionWorks/Webexpectations featured in Google’s video launching the new GCP scheme.

Google have launched the scheme to help customers improve the performance of their websites and get more sales from their existing online marketing spend:

“We are delighted to offer our advertisers the services needed to really drive conversions and profitability. Google Conversion Professionals are industry leaders in achieving the best return on investment for online businesses. There is so much room for website improvement that I encourage websites of all sizes to consider a consultation with one of our experts.”
Alan Wrafter, Google Conversion Programme Manager.

Visit Google’s new GCP website to learn more.

Contact Us – if you would like to improve sales and the conversion rate of your website.

Why are the 3 badges important?

Google have formally recognised us as experts in driving targeted visitors to your site and then persuading those visitors to take action (buy from you).

Great news for you as action equals £££’s – more conversions and more sales. All without needing to spend more money on your advertising.

Our expert knowledge of all three Google tools allows us to drive super targeted and relevant traffic to your site, to monitor and understand the behaviour of that traffic and then to make improvements that convince more visitors to convert into customers (or leads).

The benefit for our clients is they get better sales (or leads) and a much better return-on-investment from their advertising budgets.

Google Adwords Qualified Company

We think there’s a smarter way to manage your Adwords campaigns: using Google Analytics and Google Adwords together.

It sounds simple but by using both tools together, as Google intended, we’re able to get real in-depth insight into our campaigns and substantially improve the performance of our client’s Adwords accounts.

Google Analytics Authorized Consultants

As Google Analytics Authorized Consultants we can deliver best practice installations, advanced configurations and effective training courses.

Most importantly though we can help you get a clearer understanding of how your website is performing and what actions are needed to drive improvements in revenue and profits.

Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants

A/B and Multivariate testing is the single most effective lever you can pull to improve the performance (£££) of your website. And with Google’s powerful free randomised testing software you no longer have any excuse not to be pulling that lever.

We can help you to plan and execute your tests including showing what to test, where to test and how to test for the maximum uplift in conversion rate.

Interested in increasing sales and conversions in your company? Get in touch with us today

The Google analytics team have partnered with Adobe to release an open source Action script 3.0 API for tracking your Flash content.

The big question now is WHY would you use Google Analytics for Flash?

Getting a better understanding of how (or if) your users are interacting with your Flash content is crucial. For instance are you spending a fortune on Flash based video content and assuming your customers are watching it in there 1000’s?

The new Flash/GA API lets you record and understand how users are engaging with your Flash based content. The most popular example would be tracking Flash videos, are your users watching the first 3seconds of your videos then hitting the back button?

With Google Analytics for Flash you can now track how many people start your video, what videos they are watching, how long they have played the video and how many finish the video.

Need help tracking your Adobe Flash in Google Analytics?

Call us on 0845 2450 408 and we will be happy to help.

Choosing the right analytics solution for your organisation is an important task. Get it right and you could be driving more conversions, sales and profits through your website. Get it wrong and your boss could be asking why you’ve spent a small fortune on a piece of software that isn’t producing any uplift in sales or impacting your bottom line.

In the midst of a recession the decision becomes even more crucial and time dependant. The clock is ticking and there is a real need to start delivering results. This problem is compounded by the reality of finite budgets and the need to demonstrate a near immediate return-on-investment.

Starting with the right objective
Before you even start looking at software functionality or suppliers you need to define your business objective. Why are you taking the time and effort to choose and deploy a new piece of analytics software in the first place?

Here is a pretty good place to start:
To deliver an analytics tool that can give me real insight into my business and allow me to make actionable recommendations that increase conversions and profit. All within a 3 month timeframe.

Going head-to-head
Both Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst are capable of delivering real results. If you were to put Omniture head-to-head in with Google Analytics – based solely on the available functionality and number of modules Omniture would probably come out on top.

Over the years Ominture have developed a dizzyingly long list of modules, widgets and functionality all of which helps them win customers based on the mantra of ‘ah but does Google Analytics have executable web snippet refactoring technology?’

The problem with this approach is much of this functionality never actually gets used and probably isn’t even relevant to your business model or website. You’re paying for software that is unlikely to ever actually deliver any tangible results.

Insight not reports
The single most important piece of functionality that Google Analytics offers is the price tag. It’s £0.00.

Google don’t charge for the software, instead it’s offered for free and what’s more everything is included. All of the analytics technology that Google have to offer is included as standard without the need for expensive upgrades or add-ons.

If your objective is to gain real insight into your website in order to make actionable recommendations for improvement this is a REALLY IMPORTANT POINT. With the money saved on license fees and upgrade costs you can invest in human analysis.

The human brain is the best analytics tool on the planet.

Why is free important, I’m willing to pay for the right software?

I can’t stress the importance of human analysis enough. The objective of deploying analytics software is not to create meaningless reports it’s to deliver meaningful insight and actionable recommendations.

Instead of paying for software, you can use the budget you’ve saved to get the training, support and brainpower you need.

But is Google Analytics up-to the job?
Yes it is. Firstly don’t confuse the free price tag with cheap, Google Analytics offers enterprise level reporting functionality. Over the past few years Google have invested millions of dollars into improving the software.

Like any web analytics software Google Analytics has to be properly installed and configured. Without expert installation from a qualified consultant you won’t get the best out of the software. Google now offers a global network of accredited consultants (like us) who specialise in best practice GA installs.

A quick search online shows loads of old (and now outdated) posts and reports listing important functionality that Omniture offers but Google Analytics doesn’t. With the latest releases of GA those days are now over. Google Analytics now includes all of the following (and lots, lots more):

• Advanced segmentation and drill down
• Customised reporting
• Advanced filtering
• Custom dashboard
• Comprehensive API for custom tracking
• Motion charts
• Full e-commerce tracking
• Adwords integration
• API integration

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM
This is a great saying and one which probably applies to Omniture in the case of web analytics. The problem however is that people do get fired for spending huge sums of money and failing to deliver results.

This problem applies to all analytics software providers including Omniture, Google Analytics, Core Metrics, Webtrends etc the list goes on. Put quite simply – if you are paying for any analytics solution and not paying for people to use it properly then YOU ARE WAISTING YOUR MONEY.

Cost savings of £100,000’s made on licensing costs can buy you a sizeable amount of brainpower. That’s one piece of functionality you can’t do without.