16 Apr 09 Analytics Driven Decision Making
What do the numbers say? The beauty of e-commerce is that everything can be tracked and measured to your benefit.
- Track where the buyer came from, what they bought, at what time, on what day and in combination with which other products.
- Understand what page layout converts best by conducting A/B and multivariate tests.
- Use IP addresses to know what geographic location your traffic is coming from and customize what is shown on your landing page accordingly. More customization can be done for repeat visitors by using cookies. For example: Recommend new items based on their previous purchases.
With access to timely, accurate and actionable data, there is no reason to do things ‘on a hunch’
Read more:
Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics
Tags: analytics
13 Apr 09 Skycity Cinemas – You’ve Failed!
Last night I was out with a friend and decided we wanted to check out the movie Watchmen. We were at dinner, so I did not have access to a computer. To cut a long story short, I spent 10 minutes trying to find show times, but to no avail. Skycity Cinemas have struggled to make ends meet in New Zealand last night was a taste of why that is:
- Their website is too heavy and takes too long to load
- There is no mobile WAP site / Iphone site etc.
- The Movie times service on Vodafone Live! does not work
- A phone number was difficult to find and when dialled, I got no answer!
Details of each of these issues and solutions are described below:
Skycitycinemas.co.nz is image and flash heavy, but most people still have a dial-up connection in.
Of the 1,504,000 internet users in New Zealand (March 2008, Statistics New Zealand)
- Broadband: 891,000
- Dialup: 613,000
Download Times for Skycitycinemas.co.nz*
| Connection Rate | Download Time |
|---|---|
| 14.4K | 315.90 seconds |
| 28.8K | 163.65 seconds |
| 33.6K | 141.90 seconds |
| 56K | 89.70 seconds |
| ISDN 128K | 35.38 seconds |
| T1 1.44Mbps | 13.48 seconds |
One and a half minutes is far too long for a website to load, but as the saying goes, you don’t have to outrun the tiger, just the guy standing next to you:
Download Times for Hoyts.co.nz*
| Connection Rate | Download Time |
|---|---|
| 14.4K | 515.06 seconds |
| 28.8K | 266.73 seconds |
| 33.6K | 231.26 seconds |
| 56K | 146.11 seconds |
| ISDN 128K | 57.51 seconds |
| T1 1.44Mbps | 21.80 seconds |
For more about Hoyts, check out Mathew Sanders post:
Dear Hoyts: here’s 5 tips on showing movie times on your website
With over 90% of New Zealand’s population owning a mobile phone, the cinema has failed by not making it easy for people to access them via this medium. I was forced to chew through my meagre 10MB Vodafone daily data allowance
Vodafone’s Movies feature in its Sim Lifestyle section is absolutely worthless. It hasn’t worked once in the 2 years i’ve tried to use it. (Atleast they didn’t charge me for the txt requests, oh those angels)
Solutions:
- Functionality is more important than form. The flash and heavy imagery needs to be stripped down. Removing the flash module would be a good start, followed by caching the css and images. Also lighter image formats (PNG rather than JPEG) would make sense. View a full checklist here.
- With a larger mobile audience than pc-internet audience, a WAP site is essential, as well as iphone / Blackberry optimised versions that are light,fast and functional. A good design would consist of just 2 search boxes, one for the movie name and the other for location. A list of movie times should follow on the next page. Added bonus: Txt a shortcode to buy tickets!
- Sort out the Movie times feature on Vodafone Live! or get rid of it. Skycity Cinemas should have their own shortcode that people can simply text QUEEN ST WATCHMEN to and get a list of movie times returned. Again, “a reply with TIME QUANTITY (3.15pm X2) to buy would be a powerful call to action. This service should be promoted on all of their marketing collatoral, including their website, emails, movie money booklets, tickets and receipts. Ideally, Skycity should provide this themselves, but theres no reason a service like Flicks.co.nz couldn’t do this either.
- An easy to find phone number and good IVR system that tells you movie times. (Don’t switch it of after hours! What if I want to by tickets for another day?)
Looking back, this is in fact my second post about the flaws of Skycity Cinemas. The first was with regard to the launch of their ‘Film Squad’ product. My gripe was that they issued actual plastic cards rather than use someone’s mobile phone number as their membership ID, a much more convenient and less archaic solution.
Functionality is more important than style.
Site speed tests conducted using: Websiteoptimization.com, www.webpagetest.org.nz
Tags: ecommerce, skycity cinema
13 Apr 09 Good Friday is bad for E-commerce
Weekends are notoriously weaker for e-commerce than weekdays and when it comes to long-weekends like Easter. Good Friday is in fact, Very Bad Friday. While not being restricted by archaic no-trading laws like physical retailers are, online retailers tend to struggle on account of people being away on holiday and therefore, away from their computers during the day at work and also away from their home computers while they relax in vacation spots.
While there is an obvious short term sales slump, I wonder if clickthroughs over the holiday convert later on. With a 30 day cookie, standard with most e-commerce sites, this is easy to track by setting up a campaign with a tracking cookie separate to your regular campaigns. Try this:
- Pause your regular campaign.
- Copy the exact same ads over to a new campaign, but change your URLs to include a new tracking cookie.
- Now you can accurately measure your holiday advertising ROI vs. the norm.
08 Apr 09 Cart Abandonement
Why do people put stuff in their cart and then leave it in the middle of the store? Well:
- They think they might be able to get a better deal somewhere else
- Your website was too slow or worse, it crashed!
- They don’t own a Visa or Mastercard.
Let’s flesh these reasons out a bit:
They think they might be able to get a better deal somewhere else because:
- Your big box “Enter coupon code” is a call to action. Your prospect just went scurrying around the internet looking for a coupon code for your store.
Your website was too slow, or worse, it crashed!
- No one likes waiting in a line at checkout. Like the new self-service checkout kiosks in supermarkets, people expect to be able to zip right through when completing an online transaction. If you’re too slow, then they may just leave out of impatience or worse, a lack of trust for your site.
They don’t own a Visa or Mastercard…are they even human???
- Everyone owns a credit card right? No, and those that do might also have these ones called Diner’s Club and AMEX. Yes we all know the merchant fees are too high, but your customer does not know or care about that. Furthermore, you should provide as many mainstream payment options as possible like Paypal, Google Checkout, Electronic Bank Transfer and even accept checks. Every shopper has their preferred payment method and all of the above apart from processing checks can be turned into an automated process.
10 Mar 09 Your Brand on Twitter III – The Practical
Some great ways to use Twitter include:
Tell everyone where your $2 tacos are available for sale
Write a book, 140 characters at a time
Get direct access to anyone who tweets about your brand
Networking: Start getting to know people who are attending the same event as you before you get there.
Private Tweets: Why is @appleinc posts private? I’d really like to know. Make your posts private and only let invited guests view them.
Twitter is another way to connect. All your customers have different preferences for how they wish to communicate with you. Twitter caters to the tastes of a subset of your customer base. Therefore, it makes sense to include it in your marketing / customer service mix.
Here’s more tips on using Twitter: Twitter with Flitter , How to Use Twitter as a Twool , How to Pick Up on Twitter , Brands That Tweet
Tags: Brand Strategy, linkedin, Social Media Marketing, social networks, Twitter
