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.
Testing Team
Tony Uhlir, the Internet Customer Experience Manager for Cabela’s, shared tactics on what Cabela’s has determined important tactics in a successful web analytics integration. The first tactic Uhlir mentioned is putting together a successful web testing and marketing team. Numerous department heads work together to create the web analytics team, ranging, from usability to design, and use the analytics gathered by Webtrends to optimize the online store and website. Everyone from the split-testing project manager, to the technical lead of the testing team, work together to use the data to understand how to create tests that will benefit the website.
Online and Off
Uhlir’s second tactic for successful metric for
Cabela’s relates to taking that learned information and applying it to the
site. Not only are they analyzing the online analytics, they are also gathering
information from digital, inbound phone sales, in-store retail sales and
catalog orders. The company attempts to match data
across all mediums, a quality that might not be pertinent to many online
businesses. The web analytics not only matter to online sales but also
influence what consumer’s are doing in a retail space. The company’s web
analytics pulls in the data and then uses customer identification abilities
such as rewards programs and credit cards to discover what impact the online
optimization had on its outside channels.
Cabela’s measures to test online analytics versus
outside channels helped them in various ways:
- Allowed the company to understand how people were paying for items both online and in-store and enabled them to add new payment methods to the ecommerce site if seen as necessary.
- Measured the impact of online marketing efforts.
- Measured the impact of offline marketing.
- Measured the response to credit card introductory offers.
- The company has built a core system for how they track and analyze data. This helps to keep the team from having to start over each time they begin a new phase of testing.
Creating a Process
One final tactic that Uhlir mentioned was the
prioritization of which tests to run for their web analytics testing. One
useful fact about the company is that they are open to anyone submitting an
idea as to what to test on the website. It is then up to the project manager to
determine what tests might be valuable in helping the website’s functionality.
By ensuring that the tests are worth running, it saves the company from
utilizing too many man-hours on an idea that might not be successful. It is
important for the company to know what will prove a return on testing.
Site Goals
Most of the information found on the large outdoors
retailer relates to the company’s use of testing different elements of the
website and the team used to do so. Little was mentioned about the actual
involvement of analytics and search engine optimization. As the largest outdoor
retailer in the nation, the optimization of the website is crucial to a major
stake in their business. It is clear that the company is doing all that they can
to reach out to their clients and make the website purchasing process easier.
In 2010, the company expanded their mobile experience by creating a new website
offering the entire product database, as well as a redefined design to improve
the mobile-shopping customer’s experience.With an increased use in the mobile shopping experience, the integration between Cabela’s retail outlets and their mobile website could grow. More consumers may be interacting with the company’s mobile site to view additional products, reviews or information. By defining goals relative to consumers shopping on their mobile website pertaining to whether or not they are in the store or not, the company may be able to capitalize on new ways to promote the store experience and further develop their mobile shopping efforts.
Social Media
The company also attested to expanding their social marketing efforts, even launching a Facebook shopping outlet to support the over two and a half million people following them on the site. Although Cabela’s has invested in the social media outlets, the ever-changing usage of Facebook and Twitter demand the need for new and different ways of tracking data relative to the connection between social media sites and their website. Better tracking to determine how users are using social media and what is driving them to different sections of the website or mobile website would be an integral part of growing the Cabela’s online store.
Conclusion
Cabela’s has a good grasp on the necessary steps involved in analytics tracking and web optimization. They are currently utilizing the necessary tools to track data and test new programs. The company is also pursuing the ever-changing technology of mobile shopping and social media. One area that may benefit is the inclusion of consumer goals on the different purchasing outlets and the comparison of all of them. As a leading online retailer, they are a forerunner of what web analytics tracking is necessary in large businesses today.
References
Cabela's.
(2013). Retrieved from www.cabelas.com:
http://www.cabelas.com/stores/stores_home.jsp?WTz_l=Header
Direct Marketing News. (2009). Retrieved from www.dmnews.com:
http://www.dmnews.com/cabelas-hires-webtrends-for-analytics/article/152188/#
Marketing Sherpa. (2012). Retrieved from www.marketingsherpa.com:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/cabelas-shares-tactics-from-51
SiteSpect.
(2013). Retrieved from www.sitespect.com:
http://www.sitespect.com/resources/case-studies/the-worlds-foremost-outfitter-finds-a-web-site-testing-solution-that-fits
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