Parris Wells PR: 2017

Nordstrom: An Introduction

Nordstrom is an extremely successful omnichannel corporation with equally successful ecommerce and brick-and-mortar channels. The biggest factor contributing to Nordstrom’s success is their willingness to mold to the consumer-driven market rather than fight it: “...persistent digitization of Nordstrom’s business has allowed the company to grow revenues by more than 50% in the last five years” (Beath, Ross, Sebastian, 2015). Similar department store corporations like Macy’s and Sears have failed to move with the market as swiftly and efficiently as Nordstrom leading to a game of cat and mouse with the mouse being the consumer.

While Nordstrom is not an isolated ecommerce platform, originating in the brick-and-mortar sector in Seattle, Washington, I feel that Nordstrom is a particularly interesting case that should be examined in this week’s assignment due to their innovative nature and amplified digital strategy that “now attributes roughly a quarter of its sales to e-commerce” (Pasquarelli, 2017) and their ecommerce strategy spend is well over 1B every year since 2015 (Whaba, 2015).

Nordstrom has a comprehensive digital strategy that includes Nordstrom.com, Nordstromrack.com, an innovative mobile checkout system in stores, the Nordstrom mobile application, and a highly effective mobile text marketing strategy. The company also acquired Hautelook.com and Trunkclub.com which are innovative solutions to consumer demands for an easy shopping experience. These acquisitions pushed Nordstrom to relevancy and exemplified a drive for the best customer experience in store and online.

CB Insights. (2015, September 23). Embracing Retail Innovation: Nordstrom’s Dealmaking And Partnerships In E-Commerce. Retrieved from https://www.cbinsights.com/research/nordstrom-e-commerce-case-study/

Social media marketing is also a part of the Nordstrom digital strategy, particularly the use of Pinterest: “Items popular on Pinterest are tagged with a red tag bearing the Pinterest logo and prominently displayed in the store, linking their online and offline worlds” (Ross, Beath, Sebastian, 2015). This allows Nordstrom to diminish the distinct line between the online and offline shopping experience.

As briefly addressed above, the Nordstrom omnichannel business model does not allow for a straightforward acquisition of data, but rather an integration of web data, geolocation data, mobile data, in-store data, and more. However, as ecommerce is a prominent component of the Nordstrom experience, we should next examine the web analytics tools and data collection strategy of this brand.

Nordstrom Web Analytics Tools

Unfortunately, in my research, I could not manage to determine the proper search query to find an analysis of Nordstrom’s use of web analytics tools, but I did pull a website analysis of the shop.nordstrom.com website, which provided relevant insight.

In the web analysis by SimilarWeb, the report analyzed traffic sources to the Nordstrom website, which includes organic and paid search. As you can see in the snapshot, below, Nordstrom leverages paid search to augment their traffic. It is likely that Nordstrom uses Google AdWords to conduct this paid advertising for branded keywords.

SimilarWeb. (2017). Shop.nordstrom.com. Retrieved from https://www.similarweb.com/website/shop.nordstrom.com#search

Due to the nature of this report from SimilarWeb and the strategy of data collection by the SimilarWeb platform, I would venture to say that Nordstrom leverages Google Analytics as a web analytics tool as well.

I did a brief LinkedIn search to find past web analytists for Nordstrom and found that Bryan Galipeau, former Director of Social Media, Display Advertising, and Media Planning, leveraged ads on Bing, Yahoo, and Google (Galipeau, 2017), which leads me to believe that Nordstrom also uses Bing analytics and Yahoo analytics to further supplement their web analysis.

Data Collection

In an effort to collect more valuable data in-store, Nordstrom attempted two separate “experiments” with collecting anonymous mobile data through wifi enabled geolocation from their users in store using sensors located inter-departmentally to determine what departments shoppers were most interested in, how they moved in the store, and how long shoppers stayed in a particular department. Needless to say, this (Cohan, 2013). Needless to say, this strategy emerged in the spotlight as a borderline unethical acquisition of data and the Nordstrom “experiment” was halted.

While WiFi tracking data collection efforts from Nordstrom did not fully come to fruition, Nordstrom has continuously optimized their data collection strategy to gather relevant and powerful data to drive their marketing and sales strategies. Just last year, 2016, Nordstrom unified their data collection among all platforms including their acquisition platforms using Adobe Audience Manager which allowed Nordstrom to “hit more tangible goals, like moving customers deeper down the sales funnel, or to actually acquire new customers” (Liyakasa, 2017). Prior to the implementation of this DMP, Nordstrom was collecting separate data stashes from each channel, which, as we learned in this course thus far, can lead to businesses understanding only half of the customer picture rather than its entirety.

Nordstrom leverages their Fashion Rewards Program (Nordstrom, 2017) to further develop customer profiles on their site, through their mobile application, and in-store. When shoppers use their rewards number (or the phone number associated with the account), Nordstrom can collect data including: what the shopper bought, when they bought it, where they bought it, whether they returned the product, how much they spend on average, etc. This data is invaluable to a department store as it can drive sales promotions, in-store marketing efforts, and general marketing strategy.

Suggestions for Improvement

In my analysis of the Nordstrom website with the help of the Website Grader application powered by Hubspot (Website Grader, 2017), I found that Nordstrom could improve on the following SEO categories:

Load time
Meta descriptions
Headers

It looks like there is not much copy on the Nordstrom website, so there is a lot banking on the image titles and descriptions to keyword optimize the site for a group of targeted keywords. With a low score in meta descriptions, based on the Website Grader analysis, this is not helping with SEO efforts.

Though the aesthetic for the Nordstrom website is clean, makes great use of blank space, and has stunning visuals, I would suggest adding headers onto the homepage to break up the images and help the user navigate the website with more ease.

The navigation bar is very comprehensive and the sub nav bar breaks down the major categories into very comprehensive sub categories. It is very evident what the CTA is on the homepage with the top banner listing the Fashion Rewards Program, which is Nordstrom’s heavy hitter for data collection.

Nordstrom. (2017). Shop.nordstrom.com. Retrieved from http://shop.nordstrom.com/

Overall, I think the Nordstrom website is very effective both in SEO and UX and it seems that they are actively collecting data for UX optimization, which is a very positive contribution to Nordstrom’s future in the ecommerce and brick-and-mortar sector.

References

Beath, C. M., Ross, J. W., Sebastian, I. (2015, January 14). Why nordstrom’s digital strategy works (and yours probably doesn’t). Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/01/why-nordstroms-digital-strategy-works-and-yours-probably-doesnt

CB Insights. (2015, September 23). Embracing retail innovation: Nordstrom’s dealmaking and partnerships in e-commerce. Retrieved from https://www.cbinsights.com/research/nordstrom-e-commerce-case-study/

Cohan, P. (2013, May 9). How nordstrom uses WiFi to spy on shoppers. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/05/09/how-nordstrom-and-home-depot-use-wifi-to-spy-on-shoppers/#534266924362

Galipeau, B. (2017). Bryan Galipeau. [LinkedIn Profile]. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryangalipeau/

Liyakasa, K. (2017, March 27). A DMP boosts nordstrom’s business transformation. Retrieved from https://adexchanger.com/advertiser/dmp-boosts-nordstroms-business-transformation/

Nordstrom. (2017). Nordstrom rewards. Retrieved from http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/rewards

Nordstrom. (2017). Shop.nordstrom.com. Retrieved from http://shop.nordstrom.com/

Pasquarelli, A. (2017, January 30). How a millennial mindset is helping this 116-year-old retailer. Retrieved from http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/a-millennial-mindset-helping-116-year-retailer/307734/

Website Grader. (2017). Shop.nordstrom.com. Retrieved from https://website.grader.com/results/shop.nordstrom.com

Whaba, P. (2015, February 20). Nordstrom’s multi-billion dollar plan for e-commerce domination. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2015/02/20/nordstrom-ecommerce/

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Zuum: Social Media Analytics Solution

Introduction

As a social media marketer by trade, I am always interested in tools and add-ons that can assist me in providing a more comprehensive overview of the state and progress of my social media marketing efforts.

Google Analytics provides a relatively comprehensive overview of the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest platforms for ZO Skin Health with the following metrics: contributed sessions, bounce rate, pages per session, average session duration, ecommerce conversion rate, and revenue.

These metrics are valuable in that they provide a report on the status of my social media efforts, and when the data is segmented and compared to previous data, I can observe the progress of our social efforts as well. While Google Analytics provides effective data for measuring our own social media platforms, I am provided with no data or comparison with competitors’ social media platforms, which is valuable for industry positioning.

Zuum: An Introduction

Founded in 2011, Zuum is a social content analytics and reporting tool that coordinates with Google Analytics to provide additional social media details for your business that can direct content efforts in a variety of impactful ways.

Zuum analyzes the following social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google +, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. To be honest with you (though quite embarrassing), in my social media analytics reporting, I manually create a social media competitive analysis tracking in Excel, monitoring our top competitors Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest accounts and their numbers. It looks like this:

This tracking, though manual and likely not the best use of my time, really does help me to monitor our standing among competitors, observing an increase or decrease in rankings on a monthly basis. I can gather some data on social media monitoring from Meltwater, a monitoring service that I use to supplement my reporting, but Zuum provides more holistic and focused reporting.

Zuum would prevent me from having to manually pull this data into Excel, and provide me more actionable content analysis and metrics that bode well for social strategy including: Growth Rate % for each social media platform, Growth Rate % for all social media platforms, posts and engagement for all campaigns, posting and engagement by day, frequency of posting and key terms (Zuum, 2017). See the reporting sample, below from the Zuum website:

Zuum. (2017). Full Social Media Competitive Analysis. Retrieved from https://zuumsocial.com/product/social-media-competitive-analysis/

You can also export competitive content reports that include the actual visuals (photos, video snapshots, infographics, etc.) of actual content used from your competitors. This would be helpful when establishing social media strategy to determine what is successful and what is not successful in the market. According to Content Marketing Institute, Zuum “help us understand the kinds of content we can and should be producing to improve upon share volume” (Sietsema, 2016).

Zuum provides an influencer report function, as well, which will allow businesses to “see which brands, celebrities and influencers your competitors are partnering with” (Zuum, 2017) by showcasing their post frequency, their engagement rate, their total likes, total shares, and total comments.

Zuum platform also offers historical data for social media platforms, it works on all devices including your iPad, and you can download PNG files of competitive posts. Zuum offers 5 packages for customers ranging from a free service to $1,299/month for 350 social media profiles.

Zuum + Google Analytics

Zuum and Google Analytics are very compatible platforms, with Zuum providing context for data collected on the Google Analytics platform. You can observe spikes in traffic on your site in correlation to social media content, determining the most effective social media campaigns. On the Zuum platform, you can incorporate ecommerce and goal metrics into your reporting, comparing to your social campaigns to determine which campaigns provide the highest ROI.

While you cannot integrate Zuum into the Google Analytics platform, you can pair the reporting features from both platforms to further explain data, creating a more comprehensive overview on social media referral traffic and leveraging this data for strategic planning.

Real Life Application

Unfortunately, the “free trial” option on Zuum was not working for me, despite trying two different email addresses, so I’m leveraging feature overviews on the Zuum platform cross checking with Google Analytics for this example.

Let’s say I want to run a holiday campaign on social media. This campaign leverages multiple facets of the marketing mix including a GWP or a sales promotion, a hashtag campaign, and advertising. The holiday campaign sounds like this:

Deck the halls with #ZOBlue! What do the holidays mean to you? Post a picture of your favorite holiday activity with the hashtag #ZOlidays on Instagram. Every person who posts using the hashtag #ZOlidays will get a coupon to receive a bottle of Instant Pore Refiner and a limited edition ZO Skin Health + Sugarfina candy box with their next purchase to celebrate the holidays!

The purpose of this campaign would be to seed our new product, raise brand awareness through a hashtag campaign, and drive sales through our ecommerce site.

Google Analytics would provide the following metrics: Instagram traffic, time spent on site, Instagram revenue contributions, Instagram conversion rates, % of new users, bounce rate, and a few other key metrics post campaign.

Zuum, on the other hand, would provide actual engagement rates, hashtag monitoring, likes, and comments (Zuum, 2017) on all posts related to our #ZOlidays campaign, which I could then pair with the Google Analytics report to determine the efficacy of this campaign compared to sales from social media last year during the same time period.

With both reporting platforms, I could determine not only the contributions to our ecommerce site, but also a spike or a stagnancy in our social media engagement rates. We could then determine whether the #ZOliday campaign provided a positive ROI (total revenue from Instagram hashtag campaign - total cost of Instant Pore Refiner + Sugarfina partnership).

References

Sietsema, C. 4 Tools to Help Build a Social Media Analytics Report. Retrieved from http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-measurement/4-tools-to-help-build-a-social-media-analytics-report/

Zuum. (2017). Full Social Media Competitive Analysis. Retrieved from https://zuumsocial.com/product/social-media-competitive-analysis/

Zuum. (2017). The most informative data for the most engaging network. Instagram. Retrieved from https://zuumsocial.com/product/instagram-analytics/

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Kissmetrics: A Web Analytics Platform

Introduction

For this week’s assignment, we have the opportunity to expand our horizons into ventures unknown including a bit of research on web analytics platforms other than Google Analytics.

My web analytics platform of choice for this assignment is Kissmetrics, a platform with which I have never personally engaged for web analytics data, but a familiar platform due to the large volume of quality blog content and educational tools they provide to users and non-users for all things digital marketing. Though Kissmetrics is not a tool listed in our Week 2 Lesson, I thought I would analyze this selection to further expand our available options.

In the process of selecting a web analytics platform, I found a great grid from G2 Crowd that provided an overview of the top performing web analytics platforms and their subsequent reviews. You can find the grid, below:

G2 Crowd. (n.d.). Best Digital Analytics Software. Retrieved from https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/digital-analytics

I feel that the visual, above, provides a sufficient visual representation of the placement of these web analytics platforms in reference to their competitors. That being said, let’s analyze Kissmetrics!

Kissmetrics: An Introduction

Kissmetrics is a web analytics platform founded in 2008 by Neil Patel, a revolutionary marketer a SEO and digital analytics maven (if you ever have an opportunity to join one of his webinars or listen to his podcast, I would highly recommend to do so: https://neilpatel.com/).

The Kissmetrics platform provides three primary categories for web analytics observation, and they are: analyze, population and campaigns. The USP for this platform is that the website visitor is the most important component of their analysis; all measured metrics contribute to a more comprehensive overview of the customer, which is a strong foundation for marketing in this consumer-driven economy.

Kissmetrics offers three different service packages for their customers: the “Growth” package at $500/month, the “Power” package at $850/month and the “Enterprise” package, which is available for purchase on consultation.

Analyze. The analyze category of the Kissmetrics platform “tracks everything people are doing on your website or products” (Kissmetrics, 2017).

With this feature of Kissmetrics, you can segment your data into behavioral data and attribute data, A/B test various content on your site, monitor customer flows, set and track conversion rates, and color customize reports to further segment your data for visual efficacy.

According to Javier from a G2 Crowd review, “The amount of data and options are amazing… all that data can be combine with different search levels” (J.H., 2017). In the majority of the reviews on G2 Crowd, the ease of the Kissmetric interface when segmenting data and customizing reports is the biggest asset for the platform.

Populations. True to form, Kissmetrics has a powerful audience analytics feature that allows users of the platform to “monitor the segments of users that are most important to your business” (Kissmetrics, 2017).

This web analytics platform allows you to deeply customize your population data reporting to further understand growth opportunities, growth hindrances and more.

If your business requirements for analysis include KPI’s and metrics related to your site’s audience (Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, 2017), as outlined in the analytics selection process in our week 2 lesson.

Campaigns. The unique last feature of Kissmetrics is the opportunity to leverage email marketing campaigns through this platform. Not only can you monitor the OR, the CTR and other email marketing metrics, but you can actually send emails through this platform.

Though this campaign feature is not necessarily an analytical feature, aside from the email reports, it is interesting to see such a comprehensive email marketing service within an analytical reporting platform.

Kissmetrics vs. Google Analytics

Kissmetrics and Google Analytics have a similar framework, based on the descriptions of the products. You can monitor audience, campaigns, create funnels, and retrieve comprehensive reports on your business’ website.

Interestingly (and wisely in my personal opinion), Kissmetrics crafted a blog that elucidates the differences between Google Analytics and their platform. Before I elaborate on the differences between the two platforms from a third party, I want to provide the key characteristics that Kissmetrics feels makes them a better platform (Kissmetrics, 2017):

Kissmetrics identifies all sessions of their site visitors and creates a profile for each unique visitor; the platform tracks each session, regardless of activity, and builds this user profile
Kissmetrics may not have the capacity to monitor all user devices unless properly logged in (for instance, Sally registers for the website on your desktop, visits the website again on her iPad and doesn’t log in), but once the user has logged into the site from another device, all past sessions are logged in her profile
You cannot track bounce rate, time on page, and exit % on Kissmetrics, and they encourage you to use Google Analytics if you desire to monitor these metrics
You can set up a funnel on Kissmetrics, and the platform will report data that falls into this funnel from before the funnel was established
Multi-channel funnels are stronger on the Kissmetric platform; on Google Analytics you have to set up individual goals
You can integrate A/B testing tools like Optimizely into your Kissmetrics platform and create extensive A/B tests with comprehensive reports

The only con listed for Kissmetrics in a review from Slant is that the filter capabilities on Kissmetrics are limited with only one filter and subset can be active at a time (Slant, n.d.). In the review, Slant claimed that they would suggest the Kissmetrics platform over Google Analytics, but this, as we learned in lesson 2, is largely dependent on the individual business goals.

The cons listed for Google Analytics are summarized as follows:

Google Analytics will sample data on its platform if there is a high volume of users, which means that basically the reporting in the platform will come from a fragment of the users rather than an average of all data.
Google Analytics does not have the highest quality user-based data
And Google Analytics does not necessarily know what to do with authenticated users and does not provide extra reporting for these users

I think a major difference between the two platforms, which appeals to me as a marketer is that Kissmetrics allows for the integration of other marketing platforms that can benefit your business. For instance, Kissmetrics supports the integration of the following major platforms:

Marketo, a marketing automation platform that includes social media automation, which is of interest to me
Optimizely as mentioned earlier in this assignment, is an A/B testing platform that focuses on landing page development and tracking and website testing
Mailchimp, an email marketing platform, which is very smart from Kissmetrics as they have their own email service; this prevents isolating potential users

Kissmetrics offers integration of other platforms as well, but these are the ones that hit home for me.

Of course, there is also the matter of the pricing difference between the two platforms. Google Analytics is a free service that easily integrates into your website, and Kissmetrics is available for a monthly or yearly subscription.

Which is Better?

Though I do not have hands-on experience with the functionality of the Kissmetrics platform, I am inclined to say that Kissmetrics is a heavy hitter in web analytics and it would be a platform that I would like to test out for a 30 day trial.

Based on my focus on audience metrics and consumer behavior on site in reference to social media and public relations efforts, this platform definitely appeals to me and the metrics I am looking to achieve.

I would be interested to see whether our digital agency would find the Kissmetrics reporting as effective as GA in providing comprehensive reports to our team.

What are your thoughts? Are you familiar with the Kissmetrics platform?

References

G2 Crowd. (n.d.). Best Digital Analytics Software. Retrieved from https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/digital-analytics

J.H., J. (2017, June 30). Great data frustrating service. [Product Review]. Retrieved from https://www.g2crowd.com/products/kissmetrics/reviews

Kissmetrics. (2017). Kissmetrics population. Retrieved from https://www.kissmetrics.com/product/populations/

Kissmetrics. (2017). Kissmetrics analyze. Retrieved from https://www.kissmetrics.com/product/analyze/

Kissmetrics. (2017). What is the Difference Between Google Analytics and Kissmetrics? Retrieved from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-analytics-and-kissmetrics/

Slant. (n.d.). Kissmetrics vs. Google Analytics. Retrieved from https://www.slant.co/versus/1404/1406/~kissmetrics_vs_google-analytics

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