About SHOP.COM
About SHOP.COMSHOP.COM is a subsidiary of internet product brokerage company, Market America which gives its customers a unique shopping experience which includes among other things the guidance of their shopping experts and patented OneCart® technology with a mission to deliver the most compelling shopping experience for their customers. They have presented themselves as the most viable alternative to all the market comparison websites.
SHOP.COM’s Business Objectives:
Shop.com needed to understand its internal site search, performance of its various categories of merchandise and that of merchandises themselves. It is not just important to measure data accurately; however, it was known that they can rely on this data is also important for a company. This was important for Shop.com too, to get the information they need to make timely business decisions which can improve the on-site experience and conversions of their customers.
Approaches / Strategies Adopted By SHOP.com
Shop.com was using a paid solution and though it comes with many benefits over any free tool available in the market, was facing various difficulties. Because of complexity of the tool added high annual costs and maintenance, expensive training and incomplete reporting with limited visibility to their paid channel efforts. Not only that they had issues with the paid tool. The regular features of free Google Analytics were also not effective in getting them meet their goals.
To overcome these obstacles they employed the services of a Google partner, Blast Advanced Media. BlastAM worked with SHOP.COM’s team to first understand their business goals (the basics of internet presence) and also what was it that they wanted to get out of their website’s data.
BlastAM helped them in integrating their multiple Google AdWords accounts with their Google Analytics custom configured profiles helping them to meet their reporting needs and also a better visibility of their SEM traffic and products on their site.
Results Achieved By SHOP.COM
- With Google Analytics advanced features included in their website, Shop.com’s team got the information in a right manner and made better and timely business decisions.
- They have improved upon their customer’s on-site experience and conversion rates.
- This also resulted in savings of thousands of dollars on ongoing yearly licensing fee, custom reporting, conversion funnel among others.
- Full integration of their multiple Google AdWords accounts which now provided cumulative data and insight to their marketing team among other benefits.
Learnings
The attraction of paid tools is failing if one can get more in less from the free tools like Google Analytics. If that is all what is required for your reporting and analysis goals, one should first look to utilize all the features available in a free tool like Google Analytics before delving into the attraction of the paid tools available in the market. The integration of free analytical tool does not cost much in terms of its application on the website (even if it is a big eCommerce site) than what one would spend in applying more complicated paid tools and its integration, training of staff on it & annual support and maintenance.
