Monitoring performance and be willing to changePerhaps the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for any eRetailer is the vast mountain of detailed information that is available from click-stream data, (data on how visitors to a site move through the site's pages, where they came from, where they go and where they leave). According to Kelly, there is so much data that the challenge is determining how to focus on the things that will drive improvements in the business. It's possible for marketing managers to be presented with complete data overload; "we'll get a report that's about a hundred pages long on site traffic every week," says Kelly. "How do you distill that down into something that is actionable, something that has the key metrics that you really need to track?" Kelly focuses on how to get the most important information from this mountain of data. "We look at it on a weekly basis at a high level, analyzing how people navigate through the site." Some of the things her team looks for include: How many people arrive at the home page. How many arrive at a department. How many go from the home page to a department. What percentage do they take through to complete an order. Where did they leave the site.
"We identify where we need to hold on to people better," says Kelly. Since Ashford offers nearly fifteen thousand products Kelly only gets to know the areas to focus on at a very high level. When Kelly looks at traffic, she is looking to see if they are getting the right traffic based on their target market. Ashford tracks overall brand awareness through research and customer surveys. "When they get to the site it's all about conversion rates; we look at abandon rates on single page views, on search words; we look at it by department, by shopping bag. We delve in deeper talking to customers about issues in those areas, and if someone abandons a shopping bag, why did they abandon it, what is driving that, what can we do to improve that. It's always about constant improvement." FREE NEWSLETTER, click here | 