by samOver the past years we have seen e-commerce industry growing in full bloom. Shoppers prefer going online and shopping stuff rather than walking down to the nearby supermarket which may be miles away and then scanning through the innumerable shelves for the right product. Google Analytics offers a great tool for e-commerce portals. If you are an e-commerce website owner, advanced segments can prove to be really helpful for you.
E-commerce experiences a lot of traffic during the holiday season. The amount spent per person is increasing every year, giving e-commerce portals a chance to cash in on the holiday season rush. A lot of these shoppers shop during the last minute and more often search for products in physical stores, given your products are also available at physical stores. Google Analytics advanced segments can help you know more about these last minute shoppers and hence allow you to customize your internet marketing strategies accordingly.
While making your online marketing strategy, you would need to have more information about the previous year’s last moment shoppers. You can easily get some information if you had e-commerce tracking installed last year. In case you do not have an e-commerce tracking feature, you would need to create one for yourself. For those who had e-commerce tracking installed, shrink the date range to a week before the rush ends. For example, if you are doing it for the Christmas holidays, you can shrink the range from 18th December to 24th December. Now select the “Visits with Transactions” option in the “Advanced Segments”.
Now check the report regarding organic keywords. To get the report, click on traffic sources, then click on search and finally click on organic. This report will give you an idea about what the last minute shoppers were searching for. You may also fall upon some generic terms like ‘last minute gifts’. You may get a number of such keywords which are still relevant and hence you can design your online marketing scheme to include such keywords and in return get maximum coverage on the keywords that gave you portal larger revenue last year. You can synchronize these finding with the highest paying keywords for the last season, which you can get through the paid search report. You can also search in some keywords for the post holiday season.
You would now need to find out the crossovers between physical store and online store. Create an advanced segment using Google analytics in case you have a store locator for your stores. Shrink your date range and go to the pages report and cross list products against those that are out of stock which is a possible reason for buyers to check for physical stores. If you only sell products online, you can create an advanced segment for your promotional pages.
It has been estimated that more than half of the online shoppers use their mobile devices while shopping. You can use this to your advantage and mould your internet marketing strategies especially for the holiday season when shipping costs can be very high.