For the last two months I’ve focused on measurement methods that you can use to help gauge the success of your e-commerce operations. I’m going to finish up this series with a two part segment looking at one last measurement: repeat customers and repeat visitors (repeats) as a ratio to the total number of visitors your site gets, and what you can do to make sure that people keep coming back.
Paying attention to your repeat customers on-line is at least as important as paying attention to them off-line. A lot of people are still hesitant to buy products online because of privacy and security concerns, and if they’ve gotten over that hump with you, and you’ve provided them with excellent customer service on their first order, they are more likely to buy from you again.
It’s important to keep in mind also that the type of business you’re in can drive an inherent expectation level of repeat customers. For example, let’s say all you sell are high-quality, performance exhaust systems. It’s pretty obvious that people are buying your product precisely because they are well made and last for years, perhaps as long as the life of the bike. There’s probably not a lot you can do to increase the number of repeat customers unless you want to start also selling other products that lend themselves to more frequent shopping.
If you are a general motorcycle and powersports parts and accessories eTailer that sells a large variety of products to a wide market, then you would expect (or at least hope) that you’ve got a certain percentage of customers that shop on, and buy from your site.
Your marketing activities also play a huge role in how the repeat ratios play out. For instance, if you start advertising in a lot of new publications or begin a new online marketing campaign such as paid search [future column], you will most likely get an influx of customers that will show up on your radar as a new customer. Obviously a ton of new people buying stuff from you is much better than a sharp stick in the eye, but it will play havoc with your repeats measurements. Just keep that in mind before you start beating up your marketing staff because your repeat ratios keep dropping!
Measuring actual repeat customers (people that bought stuff) is pretty easy. Just look at the number of invoices generated over the number of unique visitors to your site over a certain period. That begs the question: So how do you know how many unique people visit your site?
The analysis of your visitors requires that you have some type of analytics program integrated with your website. An analytics program is a tool that helps you make sense of the huge amount of data that the web server generates and stores in a large file called a server log. Even the most basic hosting plans typically provide some type of server log analysis. However, if you are going to want to really dig into who’s visiting your site and what they are doing while they are there, you’ll typically want something a little more industrial strength.
Because it’s very powerful (and, even better, free) I recommend you check out Google’s Analytics program (formerly called Urchin before Google bought it and set it free). It’s easy to set it up and it only involves you inserting a bit of HTML code on all the pages that you want to measure (typically inserting the code snippet into your site’s template’s footer will do the trick). Someday in the future I’ll probably end up doing a series just on Google’s analytics program and some of the cool things that you can do with it.
Once you get your analytics system up and running, you’ll need to let it collect data for a while. Once an appropriate amount of time has passed and you have a good data set to analyze, you’ll want to dive in and see what people are doing on your site. There should be a report, chart, or some other way to instantly see what percentage of visitors are new or repeat over the time period you are studying.
Keep in mind that this is not a perfect number. Typically these systems work by creating a “cookie†or temporary file on the visitor’s computer that acts as an identification number so that the analytics package can tell all your visitors apart and track them as they move around on your website. If the user’s system is configured to either clean up cookies or perhaps not accept them in the first place then there’s no way for the system to know who’s on the other end of the “line”. Also, if Joe Rider visits your site from work and from his home, he’s going to look like two people to the analytics program typically. There’s a lot of other gotchas, caveats and “issues”, but on aggregate if you have a large number of people hitting your site, it’s a good way to gauge what’s going on, and more importantly to measure the impact of your efforts to attract repeat customers. The goal is to get the repeats going in the direction that you would expect based on things like your marketing activities.
So now that we have a handle on why it’s important to care about repeats and how we can measure them, next month I’m going to talk about some key tools and techniques that you can use to increase the number of repeats.
Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online
