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Leveraging Google Analytics Enabled Ariat To Quantify Investments In New Website

User engagement metrics | benefits of google analytics

Ariat logoAbout Ariat

Ariat is in the sports goods industry specialising in equestrian apparel and footwear. Ariat.com is their branded e- commerce website through which they sell their merchandise.

It was in the year 2010 that Ariat invested heavily on developing this website. The website has a lot of creative promotional content on the home page to attract visitors. See the pictures below.

Arait promo

Ariat promo2

This content then guides the visitors to the product catalogue and further purchase process. There are a lot of aids like reviews, information tabs and ratings that help the visitor through the purchase process. Ariat frequently runs these promotional campaigns on their homepage. These promotional campaigns are very important in the purchasing funnel.

Objectives

Ariat wanted to find out the ROI on the investment on this website. Apart from the standard e-commerce metrics of revenue and conversions, Ariat requires crucial information on effectiveness of their homepage promotional campaigns, the usability of features like the ‘sort’ function or product information display tabs, effectiveness of other offsite digital marketing campaigns etc.

Ariat engaged with a Google certified digital marketing company called ‘Swellpath’ to implement Google Analytics for this website.

Approach

We now see how Swellpath leveraged various features of Google Analytics to achieve these objectives.

Tracking effectiveness of homepage creative campaigns

The audience  overview report tells us the number of visitors visiting the webpage in a date range. This gives the basic popularity metric of the webpage.

Audience behaviour dimensions gives details like:

  • New v/s returning user: This helps understand whether the users are interested in revisiting the site. This also gives metrics like Bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration. These metrics can help determine the effectiveness of the web page in holding the interest of the user.Returning user
  • Frequency and Recency: These frequency metrics show how many times a user has visited the webpage. Recency shows when was the last time a user visited the webpage.
  • Engagement: The engagement metric gives the number of visitors that engaged with the webpage for different time bands.
  • The Behaviour flow dimensions give details about the next step that visitors took after visiting the webpage- whether they progressed ahead in their purchase or they exited. This also indicates the effectiveness of the webpage. Swellpath created custom variables which tracked the effectiveness of creative campaigns after the initial click. This helped Ariat track which campaign contributed more to revenue.
    Find out use of product sorting tools and product display features

    Ariat wanted to determine how the users use product sorting features and also how they use the product display features like playing videos, reading or writing product reviews, using product specification tabs etc. Swellpath created custom Google Analytics event tags for each clickable sorting and product display features. This helped Ariat track the user behaviour while sorting and navigating through product features. These gave Ariat a lot of fact based information on micro- conversions and their attribution to conversions. See the indexing, sorting and filtering options in the picture below.

         SortPerformance of offsite digital marketing channels

Ariat also carries out many offsite promotional campaigns like display, paid search, Social media and emails. Ariat wanted to track their effectiveness in driving traffic to Ariat.com . They used Google Analytics URL tracking codes using the URL Builder to determine the source of traffic. This helped them determine effectiveness of offline campaigns to drive website traffic.

Track conversions on other media

While the above helped determine the media that was driving traffic on the website, Swellpath went a step further and created tagging strategy for these media for email signups, social media offsite clicks and channel retailer clicks. This helped them find out how these media were helping the visitors in soft micro- conversions.

Result

Using the continuous stream of insights and feedback obtained from Google Analytics, Ariat continually optimised the Homepage promotional campaigns. This resulted in improved engagement and conversion metrics and hence increased revenue.

Ariat also could track ROIs of email, social media marketing and display campaigns and determine the optimum spend mix on these channels. This also increased conversions within the same promotional budget.

The measurement of video usage by visitors on product display pages helped Ariat allot more budget for videos as this was found to be an effective conversion tool.

Due to the above ongoing activity, within one year the results were quite favourable:

Revenue increased 87%
Transactions increased 103%
e- commerce (macro) conversion rate increased 14.32%
Cart abandonment reduced 18.46%
Email signups increased 206%
Channel partners offsite clicks increased 11.56%

Learnings

We have seen that Ariat.com serves two purposes: give product and corporate information to visitors and help them purchase merchandise through the website.

Using standard and advanced Google analytics tools like custom event tracking, URL tracking for different media and tagging strategy for offline events, Ariat got an accurate information about ROIs of their various online and offsite campaigns. Using the feedback from Google analytics metrics, they could continually improve their campaigns and website design.

Thus we learn that Google Analytics is an effective tool that can be leveraged to quantify investments in digital properties.

Image courtesies: Ariat.com

Data courtesy: Swellpath.com

Avatar of amitabh joshi 
Amitabh Joshi 

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