Ian Howie from search agency answers every e-commerce retailer’s wish by providing a guide to the essentials for ensuring the upcoming key trading season is a success

Ian Howie from search agency answers every e-commerce retailer’s wish by providing a guide to the essentials for ensuring the upcoming key trading season is a success

With 75 shopping days left until Christmas, Ian Howie, co-founder and chief technology officer of specialist search agency, 1upDigital, offers online retailers his advice for maximising profits this season.

“Use Google Analytics data to prepare for – and maximise your sales & profits on – the biggest shopping day of the year, Boxing Day,” he said.

“No need to stand at 5am on Boxing Day on Oxford Street, post-Christmas sales are now online. So optimise your website to get the most customers buying on the busiest shopping day of the year.

“People shop in different ways: ‘browsers’, put a lot in their shopping baskets and compare prices against another retailer; ‘definites’ know what they want and where to buy it; ‘ditherers’ usually not so tech-savvy or regular online shoppers and keep changing their minds,” he added.

Who are your customers?

Essential questions Howie said e-tailers must be able to answer include:

• How often do your customers shop with you?
• What do they on average spend?
• What do they like/dislike?
• Where do they live?

“Understand your customers and give them more of what they want when they want,” he stated.

“Using Google Analytics on your e-commerce site will produce lots of numbers and statistics, but unless you know how to extract real meaning from them, it can feel like you are drowning in data.”

But, he added: “Google Analytics has several metrics that you can use to assess customer behaviour:

• Repeat visits – how many come back?
• Repeat conversions – how many buy agan?
• Conversion rate – of the number that vistit how many buy?
• Page views per visit – how many different pages do they look at?
• Average time spent on site?
• Number of pages to purchase – how many pages do they look at before they buy something?
• Days to purchase – do they visit the site and then go away to think about it, before making their purchase?
• Visits to purchase – how many times do they visit the site before buying?
• Top content – the most popular pages on the site?
• Best performing keywords – how do people get to your site? What keywords are they using to find your products?

“Identify visitor behaviour patterns and see how you can optimise both your marketing efforts and landing pages, to squeeze more sales and revenue out of your website,” Howie continued.

“Is one product page more popular than any other, and that product outselling all others? Then make sure you have enough stock.

“If two or three keywords seem to driving most of the traffic to the site; target those keywords as part of your SEO [search engine optimisation] strategy, and bid more aggressively on them in your AdWords account.

“Also, if most of your visitors seem to be coming from a couple of cities; direct your marketing efforts and advertising budget to target customers in those areas.

“You are now beginning to make business decisions based on the analytics data,” he said.

Optimise your offering

“Ultimately you want someone to come to your site and buy something. Look at your goal conversion rate of all site visitors, how many of them make a purchase?

“People landing on the most relevant landing pages are more likely to buy,” he advised. “Customise them so they have a seasonal feel, special offers or savings for peak-time sales and shout about offering free delivery.

“This is pointless if you are losing people in the all important shopping cart process. Within Google Analytics you can look at a Goal Funnel Visualisation report, an easy-to-understand image that shows you how many shoppers are dropping out of the process. You can then work on the pages that lose most customers,” he added.

Howie also pointed that, if “10,000 people are going to your shopping cart process but only 4,000 make a transaction, that’s losing 60% of them”. “If a big percentage of those people get stuck on the registration page maybe remove that step, test the process without and see what happens to your conversion rate,” he suggested.

“Don’t get bogged down in the data,” he concluded. “Get to know the Analytics interface, based what you have learnt, a few tweaks to your marketing activity and website could have a significant impact on your sales and revenue.”