How On-line Shoe Retailer Zappos Utilizes Analytics.

How On-line Shoe Retailer Zappos Utilizes Analytics.

E-commerce retailer Zappos.com managed to take the world of consumer on-line shoe purchasing by storm. Started in the year 1999 by founder Nick Swinmurn, the brand was established as a solution to what Swinmurn believed to be a severe problem in the shoe retail industry at the time. The story goes, “The year was 1998, and Zappos.com founder Nick Swinmurn was walking around a mall in San Francisco looking for a certain pair of shoes. One store had the right style, but not the right color. Another store had the right color, but not the right size. Nick spent the next hour in the mall, walking from store to store, finally going home empty-handed and frustrated. Nick didn’t have any more luck at home, because although there were a lot of mom-and-pop stores selling shoes online, there were no major online retailers that specialized in shoes. Seeing both a need and an opportunity, Nick quit his day job and started an online shoe retailer, Shoesite.com. It was 1999, and Zappos.com was born” (ZapposInsights.com, 2018).

Jump to present times and we find that Zappos reached such a high level of success that it is now owned by Amazon after being acquired for $1.2 billion in 2009! After doing research on the success of this brand, it becomes very clear that a major key to their success is a focus on the target audience’s behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics reporting allows one to view information relating to a visitor’s session information. An article on DynoMapper.com went into detail about why this information is important for brands to consider. The article stated, “Quite simply, understanding behavioral analytics are essential! Data such as the average length of time (in hours, minutes, and seconds) that a visitor spends in a session on your website is highly important. This has a direct correlation with how relevant your website is to the visitor—the more relevant it is, the more time that a visitor will spend accessing the information contained on your website that is of interest to them. When the interactions per visit is low and the duration of the average session is high, it could be indicative of a web page having too much information—resulting in more time being spent on the page or the information being confusing to the visitor, forcing them to stay longer on the page to sort out what the information means. Also, when a brand is offering goods or services, the call to action should be straightforward and it will affect the average session duration” (Bigby, 2018) SimilarWeb.com provided charts that reflect some of Zappos.com analytic data. As seen below, Zappos.com is capitalizing in areas such as Total Visits, Avg. Visit Duration, Pages per Visit, and Bounce Rate. The brand also has a decent amount of traffic from search (46.57%) and a majority of the search is organic (84.49%). An area of focus for Zappos may be traffic from social media. The brand is only receiving (2.11%) traffic from social media.

Traffic Overview:

(SimilarWeb.com, 2018)

Traffic Sources:

(SimilarWeb.com, 2018)

Search Traffic Overview:

(SimilarWeb.com, 2018)

Social Media Traffic Overview:

(SimilarWeb.com, 2018)

Brands that design their websites in a customer first manner and use behavioral analytic data are sure to win. This is a major part of Zappos recipe, which has brought them major success. An example of Zappos use of behavioral analytics data comes from DataInformed.com. The article expresses that Zappos uses this data to track and understand why consumers don’t complete purchases and become conversions. The article read, “Zappos may have reached the top of its vertical because of its free shipping and amazing returns policy, but the company’s understanding (and capitalization) of user behavior is helping them maintain the top spot. I recently shopped on the Zappos site for sneakers I wanted to give as gifts to my niece and nephew. I did find the exact model the teens wanted on Zappos, but I didn’t end up buying them. However, the company’s web analytics took note of my incomplete purchase. Needless to say, when browsing the Zappos site now, I am reminded of the items left in my cart: Studying user behavior can tell us a great deal, not just about their preferences, but also about their online personality type. Zappos carefully words its email message to prompt me not to let my chosen shoes escape my grasp. If your web analytics show you that visitors are hesitating to complete a conversion (or purchase), use multiple channels to urge them along” (Ravid, 2015)

(Ravid, 2015)

Consumers around the U.S. love Zappos.com because the site provides access to a multitude of shoes in all varieties, options, and brands. Zappos.com has positioned their brand’s website in a customer first manner. The brand also focuses on behavioral data provided by their web analytics platform. Zappos online offerings facilitate e-commerce and branding extremely well. This is a major reason why the brand continues to do well.

Resources:

Bigby, Garenne (2018 January 24) 10 of the Most Important Google Analytics Metrics to Track. DynoMapper.com. Retrieved from https://dynomapper.com/blog/19-ux/209-10-of-the-most-important-google-analytics-metrics-to-track

Ravid, Efrat. (2015, November 24) Understand User Behavioral Patterns with Web Analytics Data. DataInformed.com. Retrieved from http://data-informed.com/22124-2/

SimilarWeb.com. (2018) Zappos.com: January 2018 Overview. SimilarWeb.com. Retrieved from

https://www.similarweb.com/website/zappos.com

ZapposInsights.com. (2018) The Zappos Family Story. ZapposInsights.com. Retrieved from https://www.zapposinsights.com/about/zappos/the-zappos-story

What in the world is a Leadberry?

What in the world is a Leadberry?

Google Analytics Partners is a collaborative put together by the Internet/technology giant that offers solutions to brands and businesses that use their Google Analytics platform. The Google Analytics Partners website reads, “Our Technology Partners provide ready-to-use applications that extend Google Analytics Solutions in new and exciting ways. This includes solutions that help analysts, marketers, IT teams, and executives get the most out of Google Analytics Solutions” (Google.com, 2018). These solutions, provided by Googles partners are created with multiple intentions including: lead generation, call tracking organic keyword tracking, and many other offerings.

Lead generation is the act of determining or uncovering potential clients and prospects for a brand’s services or product offerings. In the business world, uncovering this information could be extremely beneficial. Brands have marketers that focus on Business-To-Business sales (B2B), which is “business conducted between companies, rather than between a company and individual consumers” (Investopedia.com, 2018). Programs that have the the ability to uncover B2B leads, open doors for brands to acquire new businesses as clients and partners.

One Google Partner that focuses on B2B lead generation solutions is Leadberry. Leadberry’s main function is lead generation creation, which is accomplished by filtering a brand’s Google Analytics data. In particular, “Leadberry accomplishes this by converting website visitors to sales leads. Powered by Google Analytics” (Leadberry.com, 2018). There are various features offered as a part of Lead berry’s lead generation solutions.  Some of the features included are:

“1. Identify companies that visited your website.

Go from anonymous visitors to knowing specific organizations behind page views. Powered by Google Analytics and our proprietary algorithm, Leadberry allows you to see which companies were interested in your services.

2. Accurate company information

Beyond company names, a vast array of prospect data is compiled by Leadberry: website url, industry category, general company bio and all the company’s social media pages!

3. People data

Besides company data, Leadberry also grabs you information about company operatives! Names, positions, phone numbers, e-mail addresses to the right people at the organization, common LinkedIn contacts, Facebook & Twitter profiles are available for you, so you can pick the right decision maker right away and take action!

4. Visitor metrics

Leadberry helps you decide how serious a visitor's interest is regarding your services/products. See the source and number of visits, time spent on your website and visited pages that the prospect viewed on your company's website.

5. LinkedIn connections for social selling

Leadberry will also display the LinkedIn page of the visiting company. You will receive LinkedIn connections within the prospect organization, as well as 2nd, 3rd degree connections and common group members making social selling easier.” (Leadberry.com, 2018).

There are several brands providing B2B lead generation as a solution. Another brand option for this solution is Leadfeeder, which is also a Google Analytics Partner. After seeing the two programs I began researching to find out if one was better than the other. To my surprise, I found several articles that positioned Leadberry as the better program. In all three articles I read, there were similarities listed relating to the two products. An article on Medium.com best relayed these sentiments stating, “Both programs offer you the possibility of identifying which company your lead represents (both based on Google Analytics data), where they are physically located, and what is the sector/industry of the business the lead comes from. Leadfeeder also gives you the chance to discover what keyword they searched for (query) before landing on your website. Also — included in both offers — is a ‘follow company’ option, which provides you with the benefit of having leads highlighted/marked as favorites in case they visit your site more than once (these are the super-interesting leads, take note!)” (Verma, 2017) In the end though, all three articles also pointed out the differences between the two solution providers offerings and all three selected Leadberry as the better program. 

An article on ToughNickel.com best relayed the differences in the two offerings. While there were many comparisons made, the major deciding factor on which program fared better related to the quality of the leads uncovered. The aforementioned article on ToughNickel.com. compared the quality of the leads the two programs generated stating, “Features are all nice to have, but I wanted to check out how the two tools compare when push comes to shove, and went ahead and used both software for decoding leads from Google Analytics. Same website, same period of time. First and foremost, before we dive deeper, let’s define what an ISP (internet service provider) is – just in case you don’t know. Under an internet service provider, we understand telecom companies that provide home and mobile networks – therefore there’s no chance that you can call that a lead. Would you contact AOL saying “Good day, somebody from your network visited my site!” Not likely.

We analyzed roughly 500 lines of Network Location data from Google Analytics.

• Leadfeeder recorded 103 leads
• Leadberry recorded 88 leads

These simple charts maybe explain better the main differences:” (Cooler, 2017)

Overall Leads

(Cooler, 2017)

Good Quality Leads

(Cooler, 2017)

Bad Quality Leads

(Cooler, 2017)

The article then summed up the information collected on the charts saying, “You might conclude at this point that Leadfeeder is better. You would be wrong, however, because while in terms of quantity, Leadfeeder does result in more leads (meanwhile burning up more paid credits in a given period), many of these are low-quality leads. Strange thing though, many useful leads and major companies were only listed in the “red zone” (meaning the worst quality leads) while there are ISPs (rubbish, to say so) in the "green" (best-scoring). But if we just cut down the number of ISPs the game turns and Leadberry takes advantage. After all, Leadberry gave us back 10 ISPs while Leadfeeder provided us with 38 ISPs. So somehow Leadberry throws out many that Leadfeeder may keep as a lead - an important note here that both companies charge credits for the number (and not the quality) of your leads! Though Leadberry returned less leads in number, just a minimal amount of those were ISPs. It is important to note that due to the nature of the business, not one of these tools will ever return 100% real leads, but looking at the numbers above, Leadberry does a much better job at tackling this. To sum it up, while Leadberry returns less leads overall, the ratio of network locations converted to leads is much higher, which is good for the end-user. One more very important note is that with Leadberry you can add up to an UNLIMITED number of websites to your account, and with Leadfeeder you pay for ONLY ONE website’s (Google Analytics property actually) traffic to be monitored. Taking this as a fact, Leadberry is actually much-much more cost effective than Leadfeeder” (Cooler, 2017)

After visiting and researching the two different offerings, as listed on the charts above, Leadberry produces higher quality leads in comparison to Leadfeeder. Although Leadberry seems to be the better of the two offerings, it’s great to know that both programs have been accepted as authentic Google Analytics Partner solutions providers. The choice is yours!

Resources:

Cooler, Casey. (2017, April 28) Leadfeeder vs. Leadberry: The Lead Generation Market Expands. ToughNickel.com. Retrieved from https://toughnickel.com/industries/Leadfeeder-VS-Leadberry-The-lead-generation-market-expands  

Google.com. Find a Partner or Solution. Google.com. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/analytics/partners

Investopedia.com. (2018) Business To Business - B To B. Investopedia.com. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/btob.asp

Leadberry.com. (2018) Stop Losing Leads. Leadberry.com. Retrieved from https://www.leadberry.com/?utm_source=ga_partner_gallery&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=app_listing