5 Tips To Best Prepare Your Analytics Before and After Ecommerce Peak Season
Whether it’s the holidays or another time of year, periods with higher than typical traffic are the best time to double-check your analytics are as robust as possible, and a strategy is in place to grow online sales.
To prepare, here are five approaches to consider while planning before and after the busy season.
1. Review Previous Results
Analyzing data before the busy season may sound like a no-brainer. Still, teams often become focused on other high-priority projects and push analytics to the side. Review historical data and get a pulse check on what to expect. Create a clear path for what can be done better in the upcoming season by looking at past wins and losses.
2. Refresh Your Promotions
When was your last promotion? Tease the upcoming season with updated marketing campaigns that will bring life to your existing site and social media.
People want to shop! Knowing shoppers are already excited to browse your product selection and take action, create offers that sweeten the deal. Here are a few ideas when you’re thinking about promotions:
- Discount the shipping threshold. For example, instead of free shipping offered with one-hundred dollars worth of merchandise, consider lowering the threshold to seventy-five dollars.
- Offer product bundles. Increase the average order value and move product by grouping items together.
- Update website call to actions. For new promotions or any new content on your website that has call to actions, make sure all the tracking is set up so teams can understand the impact it makes on KPIs.
3. Decide If You’re Going To Test During The Busy Season
With spikes in traffic and new visitors to your website, not testing product pages and other features can feel like a missed opportunity. Teams can learn how specific promotions drive customer purchases and if users behave as predicted.
While fears of reduced revenue and bugs due to A/B testing are valid, opt for dynamic allocation on tests. Instead of a 50/50 split, the dynamic allocation will detect the highest performing variation and will serve out the winning test to users.
4. Analyze Year Over Year Data
Who were the winners and losers of the season? As your team debriefs the immediate results, be sure to review the year-over-year data and evaluate trends. As you assess the shopping funnel and determine the highest levels of friction, explore questions like:
- Where did shoppers fall out of the funnel?
- Were there issues with any checkout functions that may have negatively impacted the shopping experience?
“Have a detailed analysis of each campaign based on attribution, clickthrough, conversion, and engagement metrics,” explains Liza Francis, Director of Analytics at Blue Acorn iCi. “Once you’ve analyzed the data, communicate any recommendations for improvement in the future.”
Don’t forget about SEO. Analyze the data and determine how your site’s organic traffic is trending and what improvements can be made to obtain more free traffic in the future.
5. Look at Digital Marketing Efforts
If your team did something different this year that resulted in new allocated advertising spend or created new pages or campaigns to generate traffic, take a look at those efforts.
You should answer questions such as:
- Where did the traffic come from this year compared to last year?
- What was the total advertising spend and the cost per acquisition of each campaign?
- What was our total traffic versus the advertising spend?
Need help optimizing your analytics or planning for an upcoming ecommerce campaign? The Blue Acorn iCi team helps businesses make data-driven decisions. Contact us to learn more about how staff augmentation or fully managed services can help with your team’s business needs.