Panning for Gold on Your Website

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

The price of metals these days is astounding. Gold-buying businesses are springing up like weeds in an unattended vegetable patch. People are heeding the call of late night television and crawling through all of their old belongings looking for unwanted family heirlooms and other unwanted scraps of gold with visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads. The gold frenzy is one of the many side effects of the current recession, an era in which ecommerce marketing budgets have been slashed. One of the other side effects of the economic conditions a renewed focus on web site optimization. Rather than simply spending more to drive additional traffic to their websites, savvy ebusiness professionals are working to convert more of the people who are already coming to their sites. This is the ecommerce version of digging through grandma's old jewelry for pay dirt.

Within the Web analytics world it's nothing new to compare the conversion rates and the revenues of unique visitors vs. repeat visitors, as part of an ongoing effort to tune a site to be friendlier to more diverse groups of customers. Yet there are solutions beyond web analytics to help in this area. Of course, I'll point to CEM here. In addition to fine-tuning online funnels and eliminating website struggle, how can Tealeaf CX help find more nuggets of the metaphorical gold?

Allow me to share a story about Tealeaf cxResults and a truck rental customer who is relatively new to e-commerce. In these pressure-packed times, marketers are constantly asked to do more with less. This rental company was no exception. The marketing team came up with what they thought was a great strategy: "Let's leverage our web analytics and back-end data and offer a 30% coupon to every person who starts a reservation for a truck but abandons before completing it." Sure, they would be discounting heavily, but they thought it would be better than losing the revenue altogether.

Before going on a mad discounting frenzy, they turned to Tealeaf cxResults to help them decide if they were making the right decision. cxResults has the ability to indulge an analyst with ad-hoc behavioral searches, put together business cases, and find correlations across experiences—all with little forethought or planning. That means you can dream up or discover a reason for the search only moments before you run it and cxResults will deliver the answer. The truck rental company's ebusiness team asked a very simple question: over a month's worth of data, how many visitors started a reservation, abandoned, and then finally came back and purchased? The results were very interesting: nearly 30% of all visitors completed their reservations over multiple visits.

Now, with a healthy amount of advanced planning to make sure that the proper tags were in place, the company could probably have gotten this answer from their web analytics solution alone. But web analytics is hard-pressed to indulge you with answers to spontaneous queries if the data isn't already being captured, and it will never tell you why customers are behaving in a certain way. Nor will it help eliminate many of variables that can stand in the way of informed decision-making as to why customers behave the way they do.

Since Tealeaf has all of the data that comes to your web site—not just the preselected or pre-tagged data—you won't have blind spots when you have to make a critical decision. When the truck company combined the Tealeaf data set with their spontaneous behavioral search and cxResults' Result Set Extractor they were able to see that these customers didn't experience errors or performance problems at a rate that was greater than normal, and they weren't exhibiting higher signs of struggle. In the end, they could only draw the conclusion that this was just the way that many of their customers shopped—they took their time. Renting a truck is often at the center of big logistical coordination effort like a move, and many factors change before they are finally ready to rent. Perhaps customers were comparing prices. At any rate, this company was able to use Tealeaf cxResults to show that the buying behavior was not a symptom of any great inefficiency within their application. Rather, it was just the nature of their online business. They thanked their lucky stars that they had consulted Tealeaf prior to running the promotion, otherwise they would have reduced their revenue by 30% needlessly for 30% of their online customers!

In summary, while cxResults will never be able to tell you how many karats are in that old brooch you found in the shoe box that belonged to Aunt Marian, it's the best pan in the river when it comes to sifting through our online customers' behavioral nuggets.