Cross-Sell Analysis difficulties

We’ve made changes to our cross-selling and the time has come to determine the effectiveness of those changes.  The changes were made through common sense; we looked at the organic cross-sales that occurred, compared those to the cross-sell recommendations in our store, and added replaced ineffective cross-sell recommendations with strong organically occurring cross-sales. Simple really.

The difficulty I’m finding is in determining the attributable growth in store sales overall to cross-sell. Does anyone have any tips/tricks to get the numbers to show me something, anything useful at all?

We are very fast growing, in reach, in traffic, in brand awareness, and all those result in sales. Additional to the difficulty, is that when the changes were made we only looked at a handful of products, rather than the entire catalog.

So far my process looks like this: I’ve pulled comparison cross-sell reports and highlighted the products changed. The data has been normalized and I’ve looked specifically at the 2 things

1. The ratio of cross sell for the changed items against the sales of the originating item
2. The ratio of sales from cross sell to total sales for the changed item

So I have increases in individual item cross sales, but how can I know how much of an items total growth is due to cross sale growth, especially if total growth outpaced cross sell growth? And how do I take that one step further and extrapolate the growth of the store sales to cross sale growth?

Campaign Tracking

I’ve spent a few days thinking over how to track all our various campaigns both internal and external. We set up Site Catalyst, beyond the standard campaign tracking technique, to give us perpetual tracking based on the first internal campaign responded to, and separate reporting based on the most recent campaign response.

I wish Omniture would make a campaign value assignment similar to the page value that already exists. We have so many various email campaigns, adwords, etc that it is quite possible a visitor may respond to multiple campaigns sequentially leading up to a tracked event. It would be nice to see a break down of campaign value for when a campaign doesn’t lead directly to a conversion, but leads to future campaigns (or is at least within the string) that result in conversions.

The most difficult part (which probably wasn’t really that difficult) was determining how to manage ongoing email campaigns. We have a number of standard emails that run based on events, and then of course the weekly and monthly promotions, newsletters etc. How to set up campaigns for those? As individual campaigns for each email? As campaigns based around events that trigger emails?

Blogged with Flock

Back

Wow, that was quite the hiatus. But I’m back, with adventures to share and questions that need to be answered.

Blogged with Flock

WAW Nashville

The first Web Analytics Wednesday in Nashville (in a while at least) will be August 8 at Logan’s Roadhouse in Cool Spring (15 minutes south of Nashville on I-65) at 12:45pm. We’re going to locate ourselves in a back corner of the patio (past the bar area), ask the host for the Web folks, and hopefully I’ll have gotten a copy of the big red book to display by then.

Breaking from the WAW norm, this will be over lunch (which is why you won’t find this on the WAW event list - because Eric specifically asks “Please do not ask to schedule events for other days or times.” It will be at lunch this time (against regulations) because that was recommended to me by a couple of other individuals for our first time out of the gate (and Wednesday evenings in the Buckle of the Bible Belt are a tough sell). So we’ll try lunch and then hopefully move to the officially sanctioned time of 6-8pm.

Expected in attendance are Dave Ramsey (that’d be me and Brent) and one, maybe more from Magazines.com. Hopefully someone from Nissan will get wind, we’re going to try twisting arms at Gibson, and I hear that Genesco just implemented (or are in process) a major analytics vendor.

Any questions? Post a comment.

Tags: WebAnalytics Wednesday, WAW, Nashville, Magazines.com, Gibson, Genesco, Nissan, Dave Ramsey, Logan’s Roadhouse, Cool Springs

Lessons in Segmenting

We have now been live with Site Catalyst for exactly 7 days (minus a few hours). We get enough traffic to actually have some data to look at, which is nice, but we aren’t fully implemented yet, which isn’t so nice. It actually leaves me in a slight state of limbo able to see something and come away with interesting observations, but I’m unable to segment much of the data yet as we are still implementing. And so much of my time is spent watching and think “wow, I wonder if that means anything.”

For my own edification a breif story in segmenting and so what. One of our web properties is a subscription site. In the past week visitors to the home page (which also doubles as the login page) have navigated away in under 15 sec at a rate of 37%. Gee that seems high.

So I dig a little further, where are people going? Well it turns out that 32% are actually logging in. It would be my guess that most of those are on that home page for under 15 sec, but here is where segmenting would be nice (does anyone know how to correlate time on page with next page in SC? I’m unable to figure it out yet). Potential, that <15sec crowd is made completely of members loggin in, but I really don’t know that yet. And if that’s the case, why are so many non-members (68% - and yes I know I can’t really say that, but for arguments sake) sticking around the home page but not signing up?

Man I’ve got bunches to learn yet.

Information Frustration

My brain is ready to explode. Is there any simple, cookies on the bottom shelf kind of information about beginning the process of “So What Adventures” out there in the blogosphere?

I subscribe to a number of different blogs. All of them seem to offer very strong and helpful information, opinions and guidiance. But they only seem that way to me because my experience is so limited and I’m so naive that I don’t know that I could differentiate good from bad advice.

I started my learning process reading Avinash Kaushik’s book. It seemed the right thing to do, and as a result I’ve devoured as much of Occam’s Razor as I can get through. But so much of everything is over my head. I need (well really I’d rather) a central location to help me get my feed under me and learn to walk, but I can’t find anything of the sort so far.

Yes, I have stumbled across various posts and articles that have been good for my current situation, but I had to stumble across them. If this industry is growing as quickly as it seems to be, I think it would be a very good idea for someone to set a portal designed specifically for the WA debutants like me. I’d do it, but I don’t know anything yet.

Correlating KPImportance

Brent and I sat down with Site Catalyst today to begin building what we want for our traffic correlations. We made a critical error that I only see now looking back over our meeting, we didn’t bring with us our KPI’s nail them to wall in front of us.

In the moment it just seemed like maybe the heat (the air conditioning is out on our floor and as I type this it is a balmy 85 degrees in the office - but it’s getting fixed tomorrow) was making the thinking harder as we asked questions of each other about what do we really care about correlating and what’s important and what we may be over looking.

But now with a cool glass of water and a bit over an hour gone by I can see so clearly how much more easily that process would have gone had we had our KPI’s right there, not just to reference, but to build directly from. Rookie mistake?

WAW

I’ve joined the Web Analytics Yahoo group and I’m really digging it. Lots of nuggest of useful ideas come across my email daily. Some I can use soon, some are just discussion ideas I’ll have to think about in the future.

There is consistent reference to Web Analytics Wednesdays in various cities. It seems to me that a bunch of web analysis go out for drinks and what-not after work on a given Wednesday (some seem to meet for lunch) and talk trade. So who are the analysts in Nashville I can meet and learn from?

Trouble with Google Analytics

Specifically my trouble is with goals. While we at my real job are busy implementing I’ve been busy practicing these “So What” adventures using GA with one of my own sites for an event I have coming soon (in my spare time I swing dance, teaching and event planning). Little by little I’ve been learning the ropes, though I haven’t made any attempt at optimization yet, for the moment I’m just studying what means what and the implications.The trouble is that I’ve established a couple of goals in GA, and while I know the goals have been reached on multiple occasions I cannot, for the life of me, using any URL format, get GA to report any conversions even though the page that supposedly indicates a conversion event appears within the content reports. I’ve gone over the documentation, tried numerous formats, and still can’t get any conversions to appear. 

Oh the irony

I am loathe to live in detail work land. I don’t operate very well there, it makes me feel crazy. So the idea of web analytics excites me, lots of thinking and looking, asking, etc. with only a small amount of detail work (required from me specifically). So how ironic is it that as we implement Site Catalyst most of this week has been spent tediously weeding through the duplicate page names of our web sites and make each unique.