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Data-driven Visits – The Future of E-commerce Websites

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By Kaushal Thakkar.

A testament to its reliability and rigidity, e-commerce is expected to cultivate even greater results once the pandemic subsides

With the monumental shift in all marketplaces amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the e-commerce sector has emerged more unscathed than other sectors. A testament to its reliability and rigidity, e-commerce is expected to cultivate even greater results once the pandemic subsides. This shift can be attributed to the major change seen in customer behaviours and their growing preference for online transactions.

For instance, the U.S retail sector saw consumers spending over $146 billion on online transactions, which is a 14.5% rise compared to last year. Moreover, the U.S daily e-commerce sales also saw a significant 49% rise from April 1st to April 23rd, when compared to 1st-11th March, when the pandemic was not in its full effect.

So, the main concern for e-commerce businesses now is how to generate traffic organically on their websites/portals and gain more consumers? Let us take a closer look at this predicament and the possible solutions.

DATA – More enticing and relevant than you might think!

Ever wondered what makes e-commerce giants like Amazon, JD, Walmart, Alibaba, and many more stand out in terms of the heights they are reaching? If you delve into the details, you will also come across questions such as how are they able to offer better and seamless customer experience and position themselves as the top search results on search engines?

The collective answer to these questions is that these e-commerce giants are heavily data-driven in their operations. Not only this, but they also implement the intrinsically analytical outcomes of data processing to get a better view of the market and customer behaviours.

Now, becoming data-driven in operations can be a major hurdle for e-commerce websites if not done correctly. But here is how e-commerce giants smartly and viscerally approach the implementation of data-driven reports to generate traffic on their websites:

1. Mobile-First Indexing

Over 52% of web searches are done via mobile devices. Hence, the first and foremost element that e-commerce businesses should concentrate on is indexing their websites for mobiles, as it can significantly impact their search rankings.

Mobile websites are going to be crawled first by Google’s bots and indexed to be shown as preferred search results for mobile users. Making a mobile-friendly website, optimizing it for increasing page loading speeds, and streamlining the UX are the key determiners for attracting more visits to the website.

2. Building Up Steadfast SEO Strategies

Implementing a data-driven approach on various domains while creating SEO strategies has helped major  e-commerce websites create the best marketing campaigns in their respective domains. For instance, knowing your conversion rates and bounce rates can help you determine the areas you are lagging behind and developing SEO strategies to bridge that gap that can significantly improve your figures.

Similarly, knowing how much time a customer is spending on your website can let you know if the customers are closing your website quickly and why they are doing it. This can help you in building competent SEO strategies to battle the problem statements detected from collecting data for the same.

3. Conducting Comprehensive Keyword Research

It is a widely known fact that keyword research is one of the most important elements in SEO. Hence, conducting keyword research based on data collected through consumer behaviour, search patterns, and search volume are very imperative to attain higher search engine rankings. Moreover, determining the right keywords to implement on your website, which aligns well with your products/services or what your potential customers are searching for can propel your website visits to a whole new level.

4. Publishing Only Data-Driven SEO Content

Writing keyword flooded content with little to no context or girth to its meaning is a tried and failed strategy. Identifying your target demographic, analysing what type of content they read or respond to, and what benefits they are seeking to achieve from the content is the first stepping stone of data-driven content.

Now, the next step is to make the content have a ”goal”, which encourages the reader to make desirable actions, while simultaneously educating them on what they searched for. The data-driven approach comes into play at the front gates when determining what actions you want the reader to take.

5. Spotlighting Product Reviews

Any e-commerce business would know the power held by product and service reviews when it comes to customer retention and acquisition. Positive reviews not only safeguard the brand image of e-commerce businesses but also prove them to be socially credible, which in turn attracts more visitors on the website.

Over 67% of the customers are influenced by reviews, which becomes a major factor in driving more traffic on e-commerce websites. Moreover, product reviews, whether bad or good, are also an integral factor in improving conversion rates if they are promptly responded to.

6. Leveraging Forms and Surveys to Collect Customer Data

The use of forms and surveys can significantly help e-commerce businesses in getting a collective overview of their customers’ feedback and requirements. There are three types of customer data you can potentially obtain from surveys and forms, which are:

  1. Purchase History: To help e-commerce businesses analyse the buying patterns of the customers to suggest them with the best-suited products exclusively.
  2. Geographic Data: To help e-commerce businesses in finding out the most common locations from where most of their revenue is coming, along with focusing on promising or primary locations for determining key market regions.
  3. Customer Demographics: Collecting customer information such as average income, occupations, gender, age, etc., to determine your key target audience. This can help in creating targeted and successful marketing strategies.

Being Data-Driven is the Call of the Future

Building an e-commerce website and making it attractive for the target demographics is a data-based activity in today’s digital world. Knowing the customer behaviours, competitor tactics, updates in SEO guidelines, and much more are the key determining factors of an e-commerce website’s success.

Keeping the aforementioned points in mind, it is safe to say that a data-driven approach is a make or break factor that e-commerce businesses should take very seriously. Collecting, Analysing, and Implementing – These are the three pillars of a successful data-driven approach, that can help budding e-commerce websites in generating as much or even more visits as are being generated by e-commerce giants.

Feature Image Credit: Pixabay

By Kaushal Thakkar

Founder, Infidigit

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

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In News

Three Ways To Make Your PR Campaigns More Data-Driven

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By Jodi Amendola

The marketing world has become increasingly data-driven. Just ask anyone who has innocently searched for a product online only to be inundated by ads for said product in their email, social media, visits to websites that accept advertising, and even in their dreams. (OK, the dreams part isn’t quite true yet — although I hear Google and Amazon are working on it.)

The one segment of integrated marketing that has been less cut and dry when it comes to measuring outcomes is public relations. While agencies have always tracked results, the ROI of media exposure that you earn (rather than buy) has never been as straightforward as measuring exposure and lead generation from marketing and advertising. With digital marketing, an email campaign and most other marketing strategies with a CTA, there’s generally an immediate, easily traceable action taken by prospects.

With PR, though, there is often no immediate action for readers to take (although sometimes readers are so impressed by a thought leadership article, for example, that they check out your website based on its inclusion in the “about the author” information).

PR is typically leveraged to build visibility and credibility — maybe you or someone on your executive team is quoted in an article or contributes a vendor-neutral thought leadership piece. The goal is to create awareness so when the time is right for a purchase, your company is included on the shortlist. But how do you measure that?

PR has always been difficult to quantify, let alone track. Fortunately, today there are tools to help measure, track and assess. Following are three steps you should take to leverage a data-driven approach to measure the success of your PR campaigns.

1. Align PR measurement with business goals.

In our data-happy age, there are all kinds of metrics you can track, but it’s a good strategy to focus on the ones most important to your business.

For example, you may want to measure how much media coverage you’re earning versus your competitors (“share of voice”). It’s important to not only grab more share of voice than your competitors, but to ensure it’s the right kind of attention.

Look for media monitoring and analytics tools to measure not only share of voice, but also the current sentiment — neutral, positive or negative — and whether it changes after launching your campaign.

If one of your PR goals is to reach specific decision-makers to increase awareness, you can track media outlets that mention your company/products/services. Multiply that media coverage by the total circulation of each outlet and weight by the importance of the media outlet by your target audience.

Another approach to see if your efforts are moving the dial on your business goals is to do a pre-campaign survey of your market, focused on brand awareness. Once the campaign is active, survey your market again to see if statistics are trending up.

If you start by aligning your PR goals to your business goals, you’ll get valuable guidance that can make a real difference in the business.

2. Establish what you’re going to measure before launching the PR campaign.

Nothing is less effective than setting goals after a campaign has launched. In PR, it’s particularly crucial because you don’t have as much control over when placements land. Unlike marketing campaigns, it’s up to reporters and editors when the thought leadership articles or quotes from interviews with your thought leaders will run in media outlets.

It’s just like taking a trip. If you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t want to start driving before you set the GPS. You could be starting out in the wrong direction entirely. Determine what you want to measure, and then put the mechanisms in place to do it.

3. Set your KPIs.

Once you know what you want to measure, you need to know how success will be defined. And you must be sure all stakeholders agree.

Some common KPIs include:

• Web traffic changes on days when PR materials (press releases, thought leadership articles, thought leadership quotes in articles) go live.

• Coverage by type of activity.

• Share of voice.

• Positive/negative/neutral coverage.

• Traffic to landing pages vs. engagement (e.g., a request for more information and/or downloads of high-value marketing materials such as a white paper or case study).

• Social media shares/retweets by month.

• Social media @ mentions or hashtag use.

It’s best to start by focusing on three to five metrics that most closely align with your business goals or that you believe will help you move the needle. You can always reevaluate and change them later.

Show Me The Data

If you’re not ready for a subscription-based media monitoring and analytics tool, Google Analytics has a lot of free tools. For example, you can use Google Analytics to measure web traffic when PR materials go live.

You can also use UTM codes to see how much web traffic a specific placement drove. To do this, simply create a custom URL to a homepage or product page with the UTM code embedded in a link, and include it as a hyperlink for PR efforts such as press releases and social media. Google Analytics will track where users come from if they click through to a page on your website using a link with the code.

Evaluate, Rinse And Repeat

The purpose of data-driven PR measurement isn’t to determine if PR is “right” for your organization. You should already have made that decision before the campaign launches.

Instead, its purpose is to help ensure your PR campaigns stay on track and that you’re optimizing your program to deliver the best possible performance based on your business goals and KPIs. If it is, great! Keep up the good work. If it isn’t, determine what needs to change, and then pivot.

Finally, remember that business goals change, as do audience perceptions. Evaluate the structure and performance of your program constantly, and you’re far more likely to create PR wins for the organization over the long term.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Jodi Amendola

Jodi Amendola is CEO of Amendola, an award-winning healthcare and technology public relations and marketing agency based in Scottsdale, AZ.

Sourced from Forbes

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