Introduction

You have decided to be (more) data-driven? rely less on the infamous “gut feeling”?

That’s great, but how will you do it? What should you address first?

You cannot go from “gut feeling” to “data-driven” for all facets of your business in one day.

Therefore, in a way quite similar as companies go through a “digitalization” process, you need to go through a “Data-Driven Transformation” process.

And Boxalino Winning Interactions is there to help, not only with our technologies, which will be the key pillars of your success, but also with a concrete methodology you can apply practically, step-by-step (and area-by-area) throughout your activities.

In this post, we are presenting what this methodology is and what it means for a concrete example: Google Shopping optimization.

Step 1: Detailed tracking of everything visitors see

In the old days, what was meant with tracking was to keep a log of the page URLs visited by each visitor. Arguably, you might already do better than that today (for example, you might already use options like the Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking).

In order to adopt a data-driven approach in an efficient, it is however required to focus on a radical tracking approach “track everything that appears on the screen of the visitor”.

For example, this means that if a visitor comes to a Product Detail Page (PDP) and sees that this product has a delivery of 2 weeks because it is not currently on stock, such information should be tracked at that moment and in a structured way (which means a clear event name indicating it’s a PDP delivery information and a clear set of values like a color code ‘orange’ and the exact date that was shown to the visitor: ‘22.08.2022’) :

1. In order to assess what factor has an impact on your KPIs (conversion rate, average order value, etc.), you need to assess it on the basis of what your visitors have seen (and even how long they looked at it which might indicate that it was a point of importance for them) and not only that it appeared on the page.

2. While one could argue that the fact a visitor saw this information or another one (which depends on the status of the stock) can be calculated considering the stock at the beginning of the day and the number of orders done that day, which indicate what was the actual stock of this product at that time (or other mechanism to version each change of the stock over time) it is much more efficient to simple “track what the visitor has seen”, removing therefore both the effort of making such calculation and increasing the risk that this information might not be fully reliable due to complications in the calculation process.

3. You might change over time the way that you are showing the delivery time to the visitor (going from a color code to another, adding some icons or changing them, indicating the exact date, or the duration instead, all these visual differences should alter what is actually tracked as it alters what the visitors see).

In short, if you track what visitors see when they see it, you track final and definitive data you can analyze directly and efficiently and that you can trust.