The Need
We have often seen that businesses implement top-of-the-line digital analytics tools, but somewhere down the line, as the business evolves, the tool becomes somewhat unreliable. The changes happening in the business processes don’t get aligned with analytics tools and discrepancies tend to creep in – making analytics futile.
One of Nabler’s clients is a large jewelry retailer operating across North America. The company has been running jewelry stores for close to a century and is one of the first movers in the online space. The company had invested in various tools to measure the site’s performance and had implemented SiteCatalyst (Adobe Analytics, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud) for tracking the site about seven years ago. Over time the initial implementation had gone through various modifications to meet the changing requirements of the business team. During the past year the company had also incorporated new CMS features and social widgets to make the store more effective. However, the current team did not completely understand the underlying business rules that were used to design and implement the solution. This reduced the reliance on web analytics data for driving marketing optimization decisions.
About Client
Nabler helped a US-based jewellery retailer optimize its investment on Adobe SiteCatalyst with a well-investigated re-implementation strategy and user training through our unique Digital Analytics Evangelization Program. This helped all the client’s teams get better and more relevant results and insights from SiteCatalyst, thereby increasing the tool usage and website effectiveness.
Discovery Session
Nabler’s approach towards scoping any implementation or audit project is to kick-off the engagement with a detailed discovery session with all key stakeholders. Based on our understanding of the business, we identified the Web Analytics Manager, Director of Marketing, Director of Merchandising, Manager of Call Center Operations, and the Information Architect as the key people who must be a part of the discovery session. During the sessions we discussed and listed the different challenges faced by the team:
- The implementation was not adequate to track some of the new features introduced into the site recently
- As a store that managed a huge catalog of products, the team wanted reports that contained granular information about products and promotions for analysis, which was not available
- The team was unable to integrate data from external sources with the SiteCatalyst. For instance, there was a need to bring in data from Kenshoo and Responsys into SiteCatalyst
- Being a jewelry retailer, the client had to routinely deal with cancelations and fraudulent orders. These offline transactional data points were not available in SiteCatalyst and the team wanted to bring them into the tool
- Some of the team members had a limited understanding of SiteCatalyst, especially about finding the right reports and selecting the relevant metrics. This was adversely impacting the acceptance of the web analytics data across the organization
- The marketing team wanted to understand the performance of the different internal campaigns in greater detail
Our Approach
Based on an extensive audit of the SiteCatalyst data, we came up with a three-pronged approach to address the challenges faced by the client.
Address Tracking Issues:
First, we worked on addressing the tracking issues by modifying the implementation and enabling tracking of the newly added features. Nabler’s approach towards implementation is to create a detailed Technical Specifications Document together with the Solution Design Reference. The Technical Specifications Document covers the various user scenarios and lists the variables to be captured in each scenario. In this case we reviewed use case scenarios and recommended changes to be made to the code as per the best practices. Some of our recommendations included capturing metadata about the page and prefixing it to the page name variable value in the format (Page Type: Page Name), ensuring the correct values are passed on to the channel variable and guidelines for tracking the newly added features. We modified the solution to ensure we track all the variables required to enable SAINT classifications on the product-id, SKU code, promo-code and internal campaign tracking code.
Add External Data:
As part of the solution we provided guidelines about integrating data from the Responsys and Kenshoo platforms into the Adobe Marketing Cloud using Data Connectors (Gensis integration). The Kenshoo integration covered all dimensions and metrics of the client’s paid search campaigns. Offline transaction information such as the order status and reasons for returns and cancelations, together with the order values, were also brought into SiteCatalyst using Data Sources.
Conduct Customized Training:
The final component of the solution was a series of customized training sessions to bridge the knowledge gaps identified during the discovery sessions. Each session was tailor-made to address the needs of a specific group of users and we used the client’s data for demonstrating the features of SiteCatalyst.
The Results
- Modified tracking enabled the client to gain a better understanding of how visitors navigate through the site and the conversion flows.
- Having dimensions and metrics from external sources in SiteCatalyst provided additional context for the team to conduct detailed analysis.
- The customized training programs helped the users to understand the tool and the underlying business logic in greater detail, which resulted in greater acceptance and use of web analytics data across the organization.