When organizations start out with their web analytics plan they start at the basics: Google Analytics. The basics are great, nothing wrong with using Google Analytics as a means to track your customer behavior, and enable yourself to pull deeper insights on buying behaviors of customers. In a previous post I wrote about the differences between Google Analytics and another analytics provider: Adobe Analytics. One takeaway from that post was that organizations need to look at their website, audience, and analytics goals when determining what tools are best for their situation. In this post, we'll look at an ecommerce website that is leveraging a plethora of tools to meet their web analytics needs.
Why multiple tools?
The answer is relatively straight forward. Although tools like Google Analytics cover a lot of information that is beneficial to understanding your web visitors, it does not have the specific expertise that other tools may provide. Flores (2017) provides examples of various tools that serve these different tracking purposes: Facebook & Twitter Analytics, Moz, SEMRush, along with Google Analytics can provide wholesale analytics perspectives for a business.
The Golf Warehouse
The Golf Warehouse (TGW) is a golf equipment and apparel website. Through the website customers can purchase clubs from top brands such as Callaway, Taylor Made and Titleist, and all kinds of other golf accessories. According to TrafficEstimate.com, TGW received 332,300 unique visitors over the last thirty days. TGW is an example of a website that leverages a variety of web analytics tools to cover its complex approach to understanding, and communicating to, its customers. A quick review of the site BuiltWith.com found that TGW is using more than six different tracking tools on its site. Below, we'll dive into the different tools and what benefits they can provide to a business.
The Basics
As mentioned above, tools like Google Analytics are extremely valuable in providing website visitor insights and robust ecommerce tracking abilities. TGW has short sales funnels on the website, meaning that users can usually purchase a product within four clicks or less, so it is interesting for TGW to see a visitor's progress throughout their site session. Interestingly, TGW doesn't build its URL's in a tiered way. A visit that travels from the Homepage > Golf Clubs > Fairway Woods, will look like this in Google analytics: / > /golf-clubs > /fairway-woods, so TGW may need to spend more time analyzing behavior progression when a URL approach that adds page depth may give more natural insight. Omniture SiteCatalyst is another tool used by TGW, one that helps aggregate website visitor data into usable business reports. This Adobe Analytics tool provides the valuable job of make reports in ways that non-analytics users can understand.
The Advertisers
This is where things get pretty interesting. TGW implements robust advertising campaigns in both paid search and display channels. Like most good ecommerce websites, TGW deploys product specific retargeting campaigns to continually stay a part of the consumer conscience. Below is an example of a TGW retargeting display ad advertising a Taylor Made hybrid club.
To enable these retargeting campaigns and inform its advertising, TGW uses three advertising-specific web tracking tools: Google Retargeting tracking is used as a way to capture a user's behavior and expose specific ads to them.
More interestingly, TGW leverages a software called Marin to manage their advertising strategy. Think of Marin as an all-encompassing solution for advertising…a way for all of your ads across multiple channels to be talking to each other and working with each other. Ultimately the tool helps brands maximize spend within the advertising space.
The Unique Tools
The three additional tools that TGW leverages are truly unique to the ecommerce space and are fascinating examples of specialty analytics. Mercent is an ecommerce optimization tool that helps organizations list their products on large online marketplaces like Amazon and EBay. OpinionLab is a customer feedback tool, that uses data from customer comments to provide actionable experience improvements. These two tools use web visitor experience data to improve the customer experience.
Finally, TGW uses TeaLeaf, an IBM-developed software that captures customer behavior to turn into actionable experience insights. The unique component of TeaLeaf is that individual user sessions are tracked without the need of tracking tags like Google Analytics. Think of TeaLeaf as another method in which TGW can track and optimize its purchase flows to maximize the ease of online purchases.
Other observations
If you haven't picked it up yet, TGW is taking a very thorough and professional approach to understanding its online customers and maximizing the ways that it interacts with them. Their thorough approach isn't necessarily limited to its tools, TGW also uses a plethora of on-page SEO best practices to help itself reach its customers. All TGW pages include strong meta descriptions and image recognition tags. The one area that TGW could improve on is its inclusion of external links. Currently, all information on specific products is encompassed within the TGW universe, and TGW's exclusion of relevant links from other websites may hinder its standing within search engines.
TGW also leverages manual campaign tracking within its advertising campaigns so that referred sessions that land on the site are categorized effectively. For example, a search of "Cobra Hybrids," on Google shows a TGW paid search ad. Once you click on the TGW ad you are taken to the website and are given the following characteristics in the URL: Source: google_PPC, Medium: hybrid_clubs, Campaign: cobra_hybrid. This approach allows TGW to compartmentalize and categorize all of its referred audiences from its many campaigns.
TGW is a class example of an organization that understands that it needs to use a variety of tools to place itself at the forefront of a competitive ecommerce industry. TGW uses the basic tracking tools to understand customer behavior, a variety of advertising specific tools to optimize their campaigns, and a number of unique tools to place itself on the forefront of golf ecommerce. Let this be a lesson to your organization to know that you should not limit yourself just to Google Analytics and find ways to leverage the wide array of tactic & channel-specific web analytics tools that are available to organizations.
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