Cabela's Uses Web Analytics to Drive and Maximize Sales

As a major sporting goods and outdoor gear retailer, Cabela’s attempts to integrate their various ways of making sales. The company implements in-store, online, catalog and phone sales, as well as provide customers the option of a mobile experience with applications and a mobile website.

As the nation’s largest direct marketer and a leading specialty retailer of outdoor merchandise, the company must rely on analytics in all forms in order to understand their customer base, including their online resources. The company’s thriving website helps drive their total sales. 

Analytics are a key factor in understanding how to manage their website traffic. Much like the in-store operations, it is necessary to know how customers are finding out about the store, what they are doing while they are there and why they are leaving in the online environment.

Web Analytics

Cabela’s retail locations are very large, with some locations coming in at over 175,000 square feet. While the in-store locations are large, the online space must be even larger. The brand needed a way to not only be able to test their website, but also to be able to provide the services necessary to optimize the website themselves. In order to develop a testing solution, Cabela’s integrated SiteSpect into their current web space. In 2009, the company hired Webtrends for analytics tracking. This inclusion allowed the company to have real-time access to the site’s data and to aggregate information in new ways. 

Google Goals, Funnels and Filters Help You Learn About Your Website

I have set up four goals on my class blog’s Google Analytics page. The basic aim behind these goals is to measure the engagement level of visitors to my blog site and use that insight to improve my blog content as well as layout. According to a MalleckDesign blog post, “Having 1-3 goals for your site is vital. Why only 3? Well, if you get any more than that then you will most likely overwhelm yourself, your designer and your users.”

Goals are hugely beneficial if you want to see your website succeed. If you don’t have any tangible and measurable goals for your site, you will simply be wasting time and money building a web strategy.

Like in life, goals help to focus the design and development of a website. Knowing what the site must achieve gives you and your designer the clarity that is needed to really create an effective site.

This blog entry discusses the three successfully created goals, as well as the one failed attempt.  I will also discuss the information that can be learned from each.

Which Metric of Google Analytics Is Important To Your Goal?

Google Analytics can provide a great deal of insight about your website or blog, what the audience is viewing (or not viewing), as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your site design and content.  It is critical to determine what measurements within Google Analytics are appropriate to evaluate the success of your site’s unique goals.

Goals for an e-commerce website may include goals related to sales, such as conversion rates showing the percentage of people who have completed a sale of those that visited the product sites.  Goals for sites that are trying to build awareness and sell services related to some kind of expertise may measure the number of content pieces read on sites and how much of the content is read.  These types of sites might also like to analyze the success of the keywords in their content pieces by reviewing traffic sources and corresponding bounce rates.  Setting goals is important for the success of your website. 

Malleck Design mentions: “Too many sites lack focus. They want to bombard the user with as much info as possible. People in general (and especially on the web) are short on attention and patience. You need Crystal clear focus on your site to keep people interested.”

Facebook Ads Vs. Google Adwords; Which One To Choose?

There are many great debates in the world today; iPhone or Android? Red Sox or Yankees? Jets or Giants? Coke or Pepsi? Marketers today have a tough choice of their own when it comes to planning a paid search campaign: Facebook Ads or Google Adwords. Both platforms offer marketers great opportunities to drive traffic and increase conversions/transactions. But which is better? Which one should you choose?

As it turns out, Google AdWords and Facebook Ads are both good, but for different things. It all depends on what you intend to do with your ad. So, the first thing you need to do is establish your goals. They will help you determine what the best fit will be since even though there are many similarities between the two, the web audience for Google AdWords and Facebook Ads behave differently.

If you’re considering adding online advertising to your marketing mix, check out this fascinating infographic created by e-Intelligence. It takes a comprehensive look at Google AdWords and Facebook Ads by the numbers. Here are a few of the most interesting details that stand out:

- Looking at global online ad market share, Google dominates by far. But when you pare the sample down to the US, Facebook Ads are actually pulling slightly ahead of Google.

- Google wins with .17 billion Unique Monthly Visitors to Facebook’s .15 billion. However, when looking at the time spent by each visitor on the two platforms, Google has just about 101 minutes/month to Facebook’s 414 minutes/month.

- Google is killing it with an average click through rate of 2% on its ads, whereas Facebook struggles at .05%

- Perhaps the most relevant for small business owners: Every $1 spent on AdWords brings an average of $2 in revenue. For every $1 spend on Facebook ads, advertisers see $3 in revenue.

Content vs. Conversation: Is There A Clear Winner?

There is an ongoing debate, in this social media driven world ours, about the importance of content vs. conversation. People feel strongly about the topic and emotions run high when they defend their own personal stances. The debate is regarding the importance of content and conversation and which one is “king.” Ironically, both arguments admit the critical importance of the opposing view. 

Those who feel that content is king, argue that without good content, there is nothing to talk about. Those who feel that conversation is most important, acknowledge that it takes good content to spark conversation. So which one is king? Can there even be a "king" between these two disciplines? 

Content is King; it will bring conversation.

This side of the argument feels that content is what matters most; the rest will follow as long as the content is good enough. 

Michael Greenberg explains: “First, social marketing efforts need to be driven by content, not vice versa. Without content, there is not a whole lot to talk about. Developing content is not for the faint of heart. You have to constantly develop new ideas and think of new ways to keep your readers or viewers engaged. But think about the benefits. 

Most e-commerce marketers already know how to distribute information. Whether it is through Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, YouTube, press releases, your PR firm, or one of a dozen other channels, there are plenty of ways to get the message out. By making this minor change, thinking of social as purely another mechanism for distribution and taking one step back and viewing yourself as a content publisher, you can really take the best advantage of social marketing.”

Conversation is King; content is just something to talk about.

The Importance of Unique Visitors to your Website

Anyone with a website should use metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their layout, content, offers etc if they plan to be successful. Without knowing where the users have come from, what pages they visit, how long they spend on each page or what calls to action they engage in, then a site owner is significantly reduced in their ability to make effective changes.

Think of a brick and mortar retail store where they have different sections within the store. If they place certain items in one corner of the store and quickly realize that nobody is interested in those items, are they going to leave products there that don’t sell? I doubt it. They should, and would move the merchandise around and try new methods to attract the most attention.

Let's say your website received 10,000 hits in one month. Simple enough, right?  But wait; just in navigating a website a person is likely to visit the same page more than once. Maybe a single person visited your homepage several times in the course of their visit. Okay, so 10,000 hits isn't quite accurate enough. You need to know how many people came to your site, not just how many visits were recorded.

So it's several thousand people. But wait, how often did a person visit? It's one thing if they came back to the homepage multiple times in the span of an hour, but another matter entirely if they went to the homepage the next day. How long can a "duration of a visit," or a session, be defined? 

For that matter, how much time have people been spending on your site? Seconds? Minutes? Milliseconds? If it's the latter, then you're being visited by search engine spiders and bots, not people.

Easy Ways to Increase Your Website Return On Investment (ROI)

Return On Investment (ROI) is the relationship between the total amount you spend and the total amount you earn from a certain internet marketing campaign. If you are doing any online marketing campaign, then Return On Investment (ROI) is the most important measurement to estimate your success and the one metric that you must work hard on to improve over time. 

Generally speaking, Return On Investment (ROI) is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment and to compare the efficiency of one investment to the other or over a certain period of time.

Return on investment is a very popular metric due to its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a reasonable positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then this investment should not be done. Return On Investment (ROI) is the final measurement of success for any advertising campaign.

With so much discussion centered around Search and driving traffic to your site, it's easy to overlook another equally important key to website ROI - content and navigation optimization. You must design a website that gets visitors to take action.

Did You Set your Goals?

In the dot com days, people designed websites around "user experience" and "usability". Clickthroughs were considered a sufficient measure of success and very few of us paid any attention to website ROI. This has all changed.

Today, website ROI is measured by conversions -- how frequently visitors reach your goals. Goals are activities on your website that are important to the success of your business. Obviously, a sale is a goal if you sell online. A request for a sales call is another example of a goal. So is an email registration. Even if you have a purely brochure-ware site, you might consider viewing the Contact page or a Product Spec page to be a goal.