Are you BEEing yourself this summer? If you’re not, you should.
Lots of website owners use web analytics to monitor their site performance internally. Which is great. But few actually pass their findings on, to their shoppers. Why is this? Why are these analytics only used for internal review and assessment? How else can we use this information? Lets find out…

These are some metrics that you should consider sharing with your shoppers, so they too, can have the advantage of your analytics:

• 1. List Your Top Rated Items by Category. Let your customers know what your top rated items are!! What if you added the number of reviews as an additional dimension in your sorting algorithm to build an always up-to-date list of your top-rated products? This way, products that receive 30 ratings but still have an average rating of 4.9 stars will rate higher than an item that receives a single five-star rating. Ensuring that you’re only listing your most popular products.
• 2. List Your Best Selling Items by Category. Similar to the above point, let your customers know what your best-selling products are. This has been implemented by many online retailers, and again, consider adding a time dimension (such as 2-3 weeks) to this metric so that your top selling lists don’t get outdated.
• 3. List Best Value Products. Many price-conscious customers are not only interested in top-rated and best-selling products, but they are probably more interested in determining which of those products are available at the largest discount. Maybe, creating a metric that combines the rating and discount dimensions to create a list of products that would offer the most value to the customer could be valuable? Instead of making visitors do all the work, give them a list of your top 10 or 20 top-rated products that are on sale. You might get more of your shoppers into the buying mode by cutting out all of the surfing and sorting your shoppers would have had to have done otherwise, to find those products, reducing their number of clicks.
• 4. List YourTop Search Keywords. Displaying a list of your most popular keywords being searched for in your site can also drive a lot of freshness and interest. It is also a great data point to help build custom landing pages for these top searched keywords. Not only can that boost conversion, it can also help your SEO efforts.
• And lastly, 5. Return Rate. This is a metric rarely seen on any site and it instantly boosts trust and confidence with your customers. As a shopper, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many other buyers ended up returning your product of interest? If you see an item with a low return rate, you have yet another reason to buy it. And as a quick segway, are you being transparent about your shipping rates? Most people don’t want to be surprised with a shipping rate when their half-way through the cart process. Be transparent and open about it, offer shipping calculators on your product and shopping cart pages, or at least mention something about your site’s shipping policy, so that they’re not surprised when the topic does come up.

On top of all of these, if you’re using google analytics or omniture, you can use the “overlay” tool to actually see where your users are clicking and then use that information to your advantage by putting more emphasis on those “most-clicked” areas.

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So How Can You BEE Yourself? Use your Analytics to help your customers with their shopping experience.

• Reduce their number of clicks by offering lists of your top-rated, best-selling, and best value products, and get them into the buying mode faster.
• Boost your customer’s confidence and trust in your site by being transparent about each product’s return rate and about your site’s shipping rates.
• Use a list of your most popular keywords being searched for in your site to drive a lot of interest and help your SEO efforts.

All of these ideas can be tested at various levels and combinations to procure their overall effect and optimize their effectiveness.

Exclusive Concepts offers a full service testing option for our clients called Conversion Booster that will do the work for you in gathering these analytics and determining the best changes for your site to maximize conversion rate. Then test those changes in an AB or Multivariate test. Give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 if you're interested in learning more.
We would be honored to perform a free conversion audit on your qualified website today.