Gilt's Web Analytics' Success

Gilt is a membership, ecommerce platform that is centered around providing great discounts on high-quality items.  Gilt is based entirely online and uses emails campaigns and other digital marketing tactics to drive traffic. Gilt turned towards Google Analytics after realizing that they needed to take control of their data and put it to use.  

After switching to GA, Gilt upgraded to GA Premium where they were able to track even more.  

One of the first things that they did was make sure that they were getting information from their entire audience, not just the sampled data. “When the company went from viewing sampled data within the Google Analytics interface to pulling unsampled data, it was able to remove uncertainty and act on test and campaign results with confidence” (Google Analytics, 2012).  No longer would they just be assuming that the data they were pulling was representative.  Using GA Premium’s tools, they were able to react with certainty that their results were more concrete.

Another aspect of GA that Gilt took advantage of was the option to create custom variables.  This allows Gilt to really get a grasp on the information that is most crucial to the customer experience on the site as well as create tests that reveal how to create more conversions and become more profitable. “Today Gilt is using 20 or more custom variables, which enable more opportunities for comparison and analysis, as well as A/B testing”(Google Analytics, 2012). Because Google cannot have every possible variable built into their analytics, they allow you to create variables that are specific to your ecommerce site.  Therefore Gilt can track different types of visitors and their behavior on the site.  A/B testing allows them to try out different layouts, product recommendations and promotional offers based on information they have on their visitors.  The results of these tests lead to higher engagement and increased sales.

Currently Gilt is using metrics including user IDs, partitions for testing, page types, time stamps, demographic, hit times and  testing variants.  “The company takes all this data to construct a clickstream and to reconstruct visitor pathing across their different domains, analyze both onsite and external sources of traffic to sales, do site personalization, and view test results in Google Analytics” (Google Analytics, 2012).  

In addition to personalization, predicting buyer behavior is at the forefront of the company’s strategies. “Gilt uses clickstream data from Google Analytics to create decision models to predict buying behavior. By collecting detailed data points about each session related to timing, pricing, sale position, and so on, Gilt is able to feed these variables into a model and predict the probability of a purchase” (Google Analytics, 2012). This is a complex process and involves compiling many different variables in order to recreate how similar visitors behaved on the site.  While this may not be something that small ecommerce sites would have enough data to do, Gilt has enough traffic to put together these models.

Because Gilt is an ecommerce site, sales funnels are crucial to the company’s success. “To fill their sales funnel from top to bottom, Gilt has embraced attribution modeling. “GA really shines here,” explains the company’s web analytics senior manager, Ana Kravitz. “The Google Analytics standard version provides several multi-channel funnel reports that give a very intuitive way of understanding how

users pass between different marketing touchpoints. Google Analytics Premium provides an attribution modeling tool that lets you quickly view and compare the results of different attribution models” (Google Analytics, 2012). Gilt’s site is built heavily on recommendations and trying to determine which products and/or product categories each visitor is most likely to purchase.  Therefore, the company’s funnel will likely include the steps before the visitor lands on the desired product.  Visitors may be coming in from email campaigns, link networks, social media pages and more.  

The sign-up or sign-in requirement on the website allows for a lot of more individual data collection than many other ecommerce sites.  Before you can do much of anything on the website, you must create an account or sign in.  “This means several things. For you, because you have to login to see the products, the registration step isn’t part of the purchase completion path, so it’s faster to complete a purchase. For Gilt, they have a better chance of turning you into a paying customer (and a return customer) because you probably gave them permission to send you direct marketing emails” (Weidner, 2010).

The mobile aspect of Google Analytics will be Gilt’s next adventure in data. As all website owners are currently doing, Gilt is making sure that their website performs well on mobile devices.  In addition, they want to find out how many of their members use their mobile devices as their primary way to access the site. “What’s exciting to us is to be able to get as much information as possible and to get better and better in terms of our customers’ cross-channel behaviors. Mobile channels have been experiencing, what I would say, is amazing growth over the past two years. From the data analytics and customer data perspective, one of the most exciting things for us is we will be able to identify, at the user level, all of the [implications across] possible touch points…we will see the big picture and understand when to talk to the customers when they’re most active on which channel and ultimately provide a better experience” (Liyakasa, 2013).

I can’t find much that Gilt is not already doing in terms of their web analytics.  They have received shining reviews from many marketing blogs and critics.  Though they may already be doing so, I think it would be beneficial to track their competitors through some of the applications that Google Analytics provides.  One example is an application called GitGrow.  Although this particular application is mainly for smaller businesses, I think that Gilt would benefit from something similar.  GitGrow gives analytics on competitors and shows the areas in which they are performing better.  Sites like Ideeli (which is also a membership, retail site) would be good to keep an eye on.  Doing so could show them where they are lacking.  Perhaps Ideeli has created a more effective sales funnel and has managed to drastically increase its conversion rates.  Checking out the competitors regularly would be just one more benefit for Gilt.

References:

Google Analytics. (2012). Gilt group embraces the enhanced functions of Google Analytics premium. Retrieved from: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/analytics/customers/pdfs/gilt.pdf

Liyakasa, K. (2013). At Gilt group, cross-channel acquisition fuels member surge. Ad Exchanger. Retrieved from: http://www.adexchanger.com/ecommerce-2/at-gilt-groupe-cross-channel-acquisition-fuels-member-surge/

Weidner, E. (2010). Gilt group gets it. WorkBox. Retrieved from: http://blog.workbox.com/gilt-groupe-gets-it/

Funnels, Filters & Goals

Google funnels, filters and goals are an easy way to track how people are behaving on your website.  This of course applies not only to e-commerce sites, but blogs and review sites alike.  We all have goals and desired actions on our sites, whether it be a blog or a retail site. Recently on this new blog, I have been looking at how these parameters work and evaluating how they can be useful to everyone.

To start off, let’s take a look at the different types of funnels that you may be using depending on your website:

“A conversion funnel is a series of web pages which you expect your visitors to follow to complete a non-transactional goal like ‘newsletter signups’, ‘downloads’ etc.

A sales funnel is a series of web pages which you expect your visitors to follow to complete a transactional goal like placing an order on the website.  Checkout process is a good example of a sales funnel” (Sharma, 2012).

For a website like mine, I will mainly be looking for people to subscribe to my blog.  The process isn’t complicated and does not have very many steps.  However, for sites that have a more involved process, creating a funnel through Google Analytics will help you not only understand your readers’ behavior but also how to increase revenue by making improvement to specific pages on your site.

We have all heard about marketing and sales funnels in classes and in our jobs.  The ideas have been around for so long that they have to be outdated, right?  Well, sort of.  They have evolved and shifted to relate more closely to the modern marketing and sales processes. Funnels, as they relate to website behavior can come in many different forms.  They do not necessarily need to follow the traditional sales funnel.

Samantha Stanley demonstrates what you should look for when choosing goals to track (2013):

• URL destination - When you setup an URL destination goal, a visitor must view a defined URL, such as your About Us page, to fulfill the goal. This metric helps you track the effectiveness of key landing pages.
• Time On Site - Say your goal for the month is to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website from :30 seconds to 2 minutes. This metric shows how well your information captures visitor’s attention.
• Page/Visit - This goal is completed when visitors view a defined number of web pages in one visit. A higher number means site visitors are engaged and that your content is drawing them down the funnel to take action.
• Event - This is probably one of the most important goals for content marketers. An event goal can be set up to track when people complete actions such as clicking a social sharing button, subscribing to your blog or submitting a form.

Now that we understand what types of tracking we can do through GA, let’s look at an example.  Let’s say that you want to track URLs.  You know that you want people to buy a specific product from your website so you decide to create a funnel on GA that reflects this process.  We know that the information provided by funnels and goals on Google Analytics  is astounding.  But how do you know if you are setting up your funnel and goals correctly? 

First of all, you should think through exactly how you would want customers to do.  Imagine a person walking into your brick and mortar bookstore.  What are our goals once a customer is inside the store?  Initially, we would want them to pick up a book.  We can consider this the same as a person viewing a product page on your e-commerce site.  Our next step would be for the person to put the book into their basket and show intention to purchase it.  This would be equivalent to a person clicking “Add to Shopping Cart” on your website. Next, you would want the customer to bring the book to the register, or “Checkout” on your website.  These page URLs would be the different steps in your funnel with the final goal being the “Thank You” page on your website.  

What can we learn from this information?  We can discover how many people are entering the funnel as well as how many people we are losing by the end.  The more steps we add to the funnel, the more we are able to see where exactly we are losing potential customers.  Take a look at the image below.  This demonstrates the drop off for a site that requires customers to sign in before between the “Add to Shopping Cart” and “Checkout” steps.  Requiring them to do so forces about 18% of people to abandon the whole process.

In addition to this type of loss, you may notice a large drop off people after they have tried to checkout but never reached the “Thank you” page that comes up after the sale. What can we do about this, or other funnel issues that we may find?  For the first issue demonstrated in the image above we can look at what the Sign-In page looks like.  Is it too complex?  Does it allow people to continue to check out as a guest customer?  If not, doing so may decrease the number of drop off in the step.  If we find that people are dropping off before completing the payment page, we should look at what may be discouraging them.  Is the page clear and simple?  Are we asking too many unnecessary questions (like asking for a mobile AND home phone number)?  

Setting up your funnels, filters and goals is only the first step.  Then, you must make sure that you are actually checking what steps seem to be hindering your revenue stream.  Once you’ve identified the problem pages, act like a customer.  Try and go through the process as a customer, and not the seller.  Doing so will provide you with the insight you need to get more customers completing your goals!

References:

http://www.seotakeaways.com/the-geek-guide-to-understanding-funnels-in-google-analytics/

http://www.sproutcontent.com/blog/bid/170949/Google-Analytics-Using-Goals-and-Funnels