Accountability for Online Marketing

Fictitious online musical instrument retailer “Cavalier Music” is interested in improving the effectiveness of their website so they can generate more online sales. The following is a look at the process used to position Cavalier Music’s analytics in a way that met their online goals and objectives.

High-end keyboards, speaker cabinets and high-end drumsets are their highest margin products. Current marketing campaigns include: a low budget, internally managed PPC campaign, a weekly email marketing campaign and affiliate partnerships with music sites and blogs. The CEO has expressed his desire to launch a very aggressive and thorough PPC campaign on Google and Bing once the site is collecting the proper data. This means analytics will need to be configured to collect all PPC traffic correctly.

Any SEO traffic generated is not intentional as the site is poorly optimized for search engines and link building efforts have been non-existent. Because the site is poorly optimized for SEO, Google Analytics cannot naturally associate the brand or instrument type on each page. Cavalier Music has seven locations throughout the Illinois area. Shipping charges are eliminated for Illinois residents willing to pick up their purchase in any one of their seven stores and the CEO is interested to see how this affects buying behavior. The CEO has also shared his frustration in homepage and flash design, admitting the current strategy has been to change the design’s creative for the sake of changing it. Little to no data has been used in driving any site design decisions.

Our evaluation of site’s current analytics:

Initial evaluation of the website and configuration of web analytics reveals the following issues and opportunities

• Ambiguity in the calls-to-action on the Product Details pages
• Upon selecting an item, we’re brought through an unnecessary page before reaching the checkout.
• On the homepage we notice several outbound links going to social networks and a separately branded “Jam Deal of The Day” coupon site with a unique URL.
• A review of the existing Google Analytics configuration shows that there’s no easy way to separate and analyze the email marketing and affiliate marketing campaign. 
• While the client advertises on both Google and Bing, the Bing PPC visitors have not been tagged in a way that reports their clicks in Google Analytics. 
• Finally, we notice a large percentage of direct traffic comes from the location of their headquarters. Sure enough, most of this traffic are Cavalier Music employees visiting the site from their work computer.

Given the product catalogue contains everything from $4 guitar picks to $21,000 mixing boards, there’s an opportunity to track performance by product category in order to increase average order size and improve profit margins. Adding advanced Analytics tracking to the product pages will make this data available.

Action Plan:

Given the volume of traffic reaching the site daily, the web analytics will be configured to automatically separate Email Marketing, Affiliate Traffic, PPC Traffic and SEO (organic) into separate reports. This makes available a report about how each traffic source is performing. One report is configured to collect all traffic sources combined so comparisons can quickly be run side-by-side. For all five of these reports, internal office traffic will be filtered out of the report. Finally, a backup report is created to capture raw traffic without any filters.

Within the reports, segmentation filters are created to address the focus on high      profit items, price point and customer location. This enables separating any combination of traffic source and product type. For example, we could report on how many email marketing visitors placed a keyboard in their shopping cart that cost between $1000 and $1500. Also, the data will reveal activity by those customers who made a purchase and those customers who did not make a purchase while on the site.

To track the effectiveness of their homepage flash, tracking is added to each rotating flash image, which will measure how well each flash promotion performs. Tracking code  is also added to the social network icons (like Facebook) and the Deal of the Day   link. Finally, Google Analytics is configured to track visitor behavior through the purchase funnel path, bringing clarity to where customers abandon the shopping process before completing an online sale.

The End Result