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WHITEPAPER: Beauty Brands
New e-Commerce Site with Limited Internal Resources
Beauty Brands is a growing national chain offering beauty products and salon services. Recently, they opened their online store but were without a tracking and measurement strategy. Our engagement with Beauty Brands is as their analytics agency of record and an extension of their Digital team.
We provide weekly executive, sales and marketing reporting dashboards; identify, gather and store marketing measurement data; provide strategy and implementation direction for Google Analytics base, custom and campaign tracking code; manage their Google Analytics accounts, filters, goals, etc; and serve as a strategic partner to deliver the latest trends in marketing measurement and facilitate positive change.
Technical Considerations
Beauty Brands is very new to ecommerce, launching their online store only a year ago. Their ecommerce vendor, MarketLive, did not currently have an expert Google Analytics resource (as a side note, we are now MarketLive's official Google Analytics partner). MarketLive had only implemented GA ecommerce code using the traditional ga.js tracking code snippet and our implementation was planned with the new asynchronous code, which required a significant amount of additional implementation planning and guidance. We came upon a few stumbling blocks along the way, including data discrepancies for buy-one-get-one pricing, discounts and shipping due to the configuration and limitations of the existing ecommerce platform.
For example, we discovered a discrepancy between the Total Transaction Revenue and Total Product Revenue for some of the transactions. The source of the difference was the use of coupon codes in the transaction which got applied during the checkout process. They apply to the transaction level rather than a sale which would apply at the product level. This left us with situations where the product revenue was tracked as being greater than the transaction revenue, because the discount wasn’t applied to the product.
We resolved this situation by capturing the discount code as a sku, capturing the associated discount as negative revenue and passing it to Google Analytics in an _addItem call as a product with negative revenue. This gives us a list of the discount codes being used, the associated discount for each discount code, and balance out the transaction and the product revenue. We directed MarketLive to create another _addItem call for all eCommerce transactions where discount codes or coupons are used.
Analytical Results
To provide additional value to our clients, we frequently develop deep-dive analysis reports on either "hot" subjects or interesting findings we have seen while working with the data. For Beauty Brands, their mobile presence is both a hot topic and an area of opportunity for them.
Beauty Brands mobile traffic accounts for a small amount of their total site traffic, with an Average Order Value on par with the non-mobile traffic, however only accounts for a small amount of the total sales and has a significantly lower conversion rate.
In addition to buying product, mobile users are searching for store locations – particularly in Kansas City and St. Louis – and salon services. They are viewing the brands offered in-store as well as hair-related services and general salon services.
Currently the site isn't optimized for mobile traffic, and neither are most of their competitors. Given the high Average Order Value and lack of solid competitive presence, this is a prime opportunity to develop a mobile-friendly site.
Business Impact
When beautybrands.com is viewed in a mobile browser, the visual experience is not optimal and could result in high drop-out rates and the loss of potential revenue. Since Sephora.com is one of the few beauty-related sits that is mobile-optimized, there is even greater opportunity to capitalize on this consumer segment and become a leader in beauty products & services in the future.
Rather than just recreating the existing site in a mobile environment, we recommended capitalizing on products and site sections that have the best opportunity to serve the mobile traffic segment and drive offline and online revenue. Mobile visitors are just as apt to spend as much money per order as regular site visitors, making the mobile segment ripe with opportunity for growth in revenue, another positive for the bottom line.
© 2012 Alight Interactive Inc
