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.