Imagine steering a ship in the fog and having nothing to gauge your direction with but the wheel in your hands... What about flying a plane in the clouds and not even having a working compass... Without Web Site Analytics to help gauge what direction your website is taking, you may simply end up in a bad situation or not even know that’s where you’re headed.

RetailRev understands the importance of knowing exactly what is happening with your website and the traffic it’s receiving. Consider knowing exactly what path website visitors take to subscribe to your list or purchase your product AND where they are falling off along that path.

If you know exactly where they are falling off, costing you marketing money, you can easily fix it and get your website back on course.

Some of the key things to measure are landing pages, e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed. The information is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

Here at RetailRev, you are now one step closer to knowing what’s really happening with your website and what can be done to improve it and we offer analytics for websites of all sizes.

Call us now at 800-980-1746 and find out more about how Web Site Analytics can help your business

If you have larger, more sophisticated websites that need more detailed and extensive analytics, testing and tracking programs, read this next section.

E-tailers often have a hard time on the internet. Just getting all your SKUS into ANY shopping cart and keeping it updated is a task in itself, even if you have a good POS system such as Retail Pro.

But that is just the beginning. Customers don't care about that. They don't even care about all your products. Usually they are interested in ONE right now. Either your page sells them or they move onto someone else's website. That is the brutal truth.

How can you test sales copy, different images, a better sales process, or see where you are losing customers and sales? There is no easy or pat answer, because people come to us using all kinds of systems. Some of them are much more conductive to tracking the efficiency of the sites and most just aren't. But no matter what you are using, tracking all your ROI for every visitor, and constantly split-testing different aspects of your site to increase sales is critical for you as a retailer. Your best competitors are doing this and if you have a "set it and forget it" attitude toward your shopping cart and website you are standing still while all your retail competitors are actually running the race.

For clients that have completed some of our other services and now need that extra boost to maximize the efficiency of their site and the sales process, we do the following, in approximately this order.

1) We make small changes to your site that we know from over 25 years of retail experience and 50 years of combined internet marketing experience that will likely improve your sales on your site, and then track the results.

2) Once we have done 1) above, several times and now have your site in the profitable zone, we then break out the multivariate testing application. Multivariate testing is based on mathematical algorithms to evaluate the conversion factors of several aspects of any given page simultaneously, and then uses a recursive algorithm to then optimize any given webpage on the fly. What? Did we lose you?

Lets explain this another way....

What if you could take your website, and say, “I wonder if my site was blue how that would affect sales... I wonder if my headlines were bold... I wonder if I used a different description of the product with more hype... I wonder if I used a different picture there....”

If you could test ALL these things, at the same time, and have your web pages AUTOMATICALLY get better and better in terms of sales, do you think your profits would increase? Excellent! Go to the head of the class. That’s right, they would.

In a nutshell, that is what multivariate testing can do. Your pages automatically get better, because you are able to see how much each factor of your website affects sales volume. Multivariate testing can also be used much more simply by doing what marketers call the old time split test, which is a common feature in the promotions you receive from direct mail companies. Instead of multiple versions of each page, you have two versions of each page, so that gradually you can test a page that has picture A vs. picture B, and see just the results of that one element.

This type of testing is not cheap. Companies like http://optimost.com do it for $30,000 for a 5-6 week test on ONE page for clients like realtor.com, eBay and ask.com. We have found a way that is a little more cost effective for retailers, but is not necessarily suitable for very small retailers. Nevertheless, when it is time to really take the stops off of everything and trounce your competition, multivariate testing along with carefully monitoring the sites of your competitors is the way to do it. The larger retailers are already using this on their sites. Don't let them leave you in the dust.

Call us now at 800-980-1746 and find out more about how multivariate testing can help you dominate your retail category or fill out the Contact Us form now!