About Motosport.com
MotoSport.com was founded by William Butcher in 1999. He used to be an expert class racer in the AMA District 13 during the late 70s to early 80s. Due to his focus on academics and career he did not get time to continue racing. But, in January 1998, Bill purchased a new KX250 with the plan to return to racing. Several trips to the local motorcycle dealer left him less than impressed. He found that little product was actually stocked, and the staff had to spread their product knowledge over more than motorcycles and ATVs. Bill realized the need for a shop to cater to the motorcycle/ATV specific community, and MotoSport.com was born.
MotoSport.com focuses on a few basic principles: Deliver superior customer service; keep an inventory of products that they sold; provide competitive pricing; and most importantly, hiring and retaining staff that is as dedicated to riding as the customers they served. They saw a rapid growth due the core principles they followed.
MotoSport.com, being a leading online motorcycle and ATV parts and equipment seller relied heavily on web analytics to drive site changes and marketing initiatives. Having used Omniture for some time, they now felt the need for a different tracking tool for their website which could better address their needs. The requirement was for a customizable and user-friendly tool with minimal switching costs which would help them migrate without sacrificing their data.
Strategy
MotoSport.com took the help of an agency to help them with the migration. They developed a series of steps or use cases to ease MotoSport.com through the transition. The analytic strategy needed proper steps for implementation. For this the team at SwellPath needed to identify the objective of MotoSport.com. Also, they had to determine the current the current data metrics that Motosport.com was getting so as to be able to extract the same metrics from Google Analytics. The prevailing profile configurations, content architecture, and custom tags were mapped to the Google Analytics profile.
Once the groundwork is done and all the mapping is done, the key stakeholders of MotoSport.com determined the business objectives, goals, KPIs and additional information accumulation that had not been set up with their SiteCatalyst installation. With business goals recognized, use cases were put in place to drive the information gathering including item sorting and separating, cross-storefront navigation, sales attribution and utilization of the client administration interface.
The following use cases were implemented.
- Product Filtering – SwellPath gave solutions to catch numerous filtering and sorting by using event tagging which dynamically appended the event values with strings of information that captured a whole product interaction. This helped MotoSport.com understand how their visitors used the sorting/filtering options in relation to the other as opposed to a series of isolated, inconsequential occasions.
- Visitor Segmentation – With the prevailing analytics tool, SiteCatalyst, MotoSport.com wasn’t able to identify navigation between their various storefronts – Cruiser, ATV, Sport, Dirt. It was therefore recommended to use a custom variable set at the session level to track the initial selection of storefront and the navigation that happened thereafter from that page to other storefronts. This information gave MotoSport.com much needed insights both the volume of users who are crossing between storefronts and which storefronts demonstrated the most cross navigation.
They used customized tagging to track interactions on the website which included –
- Request for catalogs
- Live chat usage
- Interest in internal campaigns, ie, clicks on banners, marquee images, etc
- Cross selling selections
- Interactions on wish lists, product images, videos
With Google Analytics, a lot of customization is possible – custom tagging, custom reports, custom variables, etc. It is possible to have customized reports in Google Analytics and MotoSport.com configured it so as to be able to easily access their new data on Google Analytics.
They configured their reports to show:
- Campaign Report- They got reports on e-commerce performance metrics, source-based site performance metrics, and acquisition of new visitors metrics.
- Keyword Acquisition Report- They could now see the page on which visitors landed compared to the “keyword” they used to reach the site. This was further customized to show metrics compared under the dimensions of region and country.
- Landing Page Performance Report- Google Analytics helps to give metrics related to how a landing page is performing as a site entry point, which of the landing pages are able to capture new and returning visitors, which landing pages have a high rate of exits. Here the primary dimension used was that of landing page with the sub dimension of keywords.
- Business Impact Report- With Google Analytics it is possible to have a report on the impact on business, thanks to the cookies/users. It can be measured for various metrics under both e-commerce or non e-commerce websites.
Result
Using Google Analytics for MotoSport.com effectively mapped existing information, while building in new and significant analysis system, KPIs and measurements. The new KPIs and measurements gave MotoSport.com a superior comprehension of their site performance and visitor interactions, prompting better knowledge and in this way letting MotoSport.com do more informed decision-making from everything to media arrangements and on-site messaging to cross selling and social media performance.
Image Credits: socalotmx, cxfocus, hmtweb