Blast Analytics and Marketing

SHOP.COM Analytics Transition

Supporting Leaders to EVOLVE

Large Scale Ecommerce Transitions from Paid to Free Analytics

SHOP.COM needed an analytics consultant to coordinate their transition from Adobe SiteCatalyst to Google Analytics.

For a company that delivers curated advice from shopping experts to save shoppers money, measuring site and product performance is critical. Understanding internal site search, category, and product performance and knowing they can rely on accurate data is paramount.

Challenge with Existing Analytics Tool

  1. In-house developed tools were too complex or various departments
  2. High annual costs and maintenance
  3. Cost prohibitive training
  4. Incomplete reporting
  5. Limited visibility into performance of the many SEM traffic sources
  6. “Out-of-the-box” Google Analytics reporting and goal configuration features didn’t meet their needs.

Solution

SHOP.COM now has a reporting and analytics solution that is free, easy to use, and fully configured to gain actionable insights.

SHOP.COM Analytics User Path

The transition to a custom Google Analytics configuration met all of their existing reporting needs as well as met new reporting goals that weren’t previously available. SHOP.COM gained better visibility into their many SEM traffic sources and millions of products in their marketplace.

Through our discovery process, Blast worked with the SHOP.COM team to understand their business goals and analysis objectives. With SHOP.COM’s extensive product offerings and traffic, they have more product pageviews than Google Analytics can handle with a basic implementation.

Blast worked with their team to develop and implement a custom tracking strategy that would both meet their analysis objectives and provide for easy access to reports containing actionable insight.

Blast was able to integrate multiple Google AdWords accounts with their Google Analytics profiles to provide cost and conversion data that was previously not available.

The end result was a successful implementation that exceeded SHOP.COM’s expectations.

The Blast Team did a remarkable job of understanding our business needs and guiding us to build a solution leveraging Google Analytics. They provided clear and concise direction under a very tight schedule. The end result is that we now have tools in place that help us measure the ROI of all our web site changes

Vince Hunt, Chief Operating Officer
Shop.com

Knowledge is Power

Now, with Google Analytics extended to use profiles, goals, ecommerce tracking, on-site search tracking and more, the SHOP.COM team will get the information they need to make timely business decisions that has already improved their on-site experience and conversions.

Benefits of Google Analytics over a Paid Solution:

  • Free access to data with no ongoing yearly licensing fee
  • Many of the same custom reporting, conversion funnel and analysis features with no cost, saving SHOP.COM thousands of dollars
  • Fully integrated multiple Google Adwords accounts, providing consolidated insight to the marketing team
  • A more intuitive user interface
  • Reduced training costs
  • Ease of access to information for multiple departments
  • Easy to setup separate data views for those with limited access levels

Making the Switch from Paid to Free

Google Analytics

If you’re considering making the switch from a paid analytics solution like Adobe SiteCatalyst, Webtrends or Coremetrics to Google Analytics, there can be many benefits to doing so. Especially, if you get an expert to help you take advantage of the full spectrum of features and capabilities.

Blast’s entire online marketing team is Google certified and knows these solutions inside and out. If you are interested in seeing what advanced Google Analytics configuration can do to provide insight for your business, talk to the Blast team to find out how you can realize the benefits of all that Google Analytics has to offer.