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How Analytics can identify problems with your website trading
23 Nov 2015 Dominic Comments Off on How Analytics can identify problems with your website trading
Sometimes when looking at year on year sales data it can be difficult trying to establish the real reasons for certain issues your business is facing in terms of sales – and with a plethora of data, third parties you may be working with plus your own back end sales data, it can sometimes be hard to see the wood from the trees and actually identify the real reasons for slow year on year sales growth.
Consider this problem which an ex colleague had when trying to understand exactly why sales were down YOY online despite retail outlets being on average 10% up YOY. Initially what he saw was heartening in terms of conversion rates. The retailer she was working for really had a web offering which was substantially behind the competition in terms of functionality and this was part of her initial work on bringing the website up to speed with new recruitment channels, improved SEO performance, better site indexing and an improvement to how they actually traded the website.
Looking at conversion rates across desktop, mobile and tablet, the uplift in conversion since a lot of the initial activity was made live (July) was positive and indicated a move in the right direction however what she also saw was a drop in conversion as the AOV dropped considerably in recent months. The reason for this was addition of certain events to the site which were added to basket in analytics but at no cost – ie they were reserved. This saw AOV drop but skewing conversion rates positively.
In addition, what no-one had considered in planning in activity in the year was the impact having no mobile website would have on sales YOY. This company saw a shift in traffic from desktop (54% in 2014) to mobile (34% in 2015. This would not have been a problem had the company had a mobile optimised website.
Unfortunately they did not – and this meant a 20% loss in traffic from a channel which was converting at 1.8% to another channel converting at .8%.
To sum up, if you are seeing a challenging YOY sales report online and struggling to see why the sales are down YOY despite offline sales being up, sometimes the analytical data will clearly help identify what the issues are and what you need to address to rectify them – in this case strip out all non product SKUs in the report and get moving on a mobile optimised website.
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