It’s April and time to get ready for the holidays.
On Cyber Monday last year, mobile traffic accounted for 31.7% of all online traffic, which was a 45% increase over 2012. This traffic accounted for 17% of all online sales –an increase by more than half over 2012. (Source)
If you’re a retailer and you weren’t tracking this explosion in traffic and conversions, you missed out on some valuable data.
Here’s another stat. Social sites like Facebook and Pinterest drove a lot of successful conversions, both accounting for average orders of over $90US.
The convergence of mobile and social is a powerful force. For companies tracking these customer touch points, the insights can be transformative. Wouldn’t it be great to know that a user who pins an image of one of your products tends to come to your site 3-5 days later on a tablet to buy? You could certainly do better forecasting and promoting.
To get ready for the onslaught of the holiday season you need to be putting your house in order today. Some steps you can take now to be ready:
Review and revise your segmentation – This is foundational to being able to optimize and personalize offers and promotions to convert more browsers into buyers. If your segments are out of date, then you’re likely to make wrong decisions about how to engage customers.
Tag your mobile channels – Make sure you understand what behavior you want to understand and tag apps and mobile sites accordingly. If trends continue, you may miss out on measuring more than 40% of your traffic this holiday season.
Identify data siloes and make a plan to integrate analytics – Insights are lost if channels are treated as independent siloes. If you can’t see how a single prospect browses on a PC but purchases on a tablet, you will make wrong evaluations about your channels. The PC channel will look weak in comparison to the tablet. But if the PC is the research channel and the tablet is the buy channel, they’re working together. You may penalize the PC channel without realizing that it is a key part of the overall buying process.
Make sure your mobile, social, and web analytics are talking to each other – Measuring social is no longer about likes, comments, pins and tweets. At minimum, it should be about campaigns and conversions. To get this level of understanding, you need to make sure that your tagging and measurement strategies are linked across platforms.
Taking some of these steps can help you get ready for a busy holiday season. Don’t miss out on the wealth of learning to be done.
