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How Wayfair Used Data & SEO to Transform E-Commerce

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In 2002, Steve Conine and Niraj Shah founded CSN Stores, the parent company of more than 250 standalone websites that sold household items ranging from barstools to stereo racks (Wayfair, 2019). The idea of having standalone e-commerce websites came from carefully analyzing internet search patterns and was deeply rooted in search engine optimization, coming to the conclusion that offering a large selection of a specific item on a website will drive traffic to shoppers looking for that category of item. They managed websites such as AllBarsStools.com, EveryMirror.com, and BedroomFurnitureDirect.com, each offering thousands of selections as well as editorial content on how to pick the right mirror or bar stool, or whatever the specific category the website was selling (Peterson, 2014). Although they saw about 4.8 million customers by 2010 (Peterson, 2014), CSN Stores was having a hard time growing its repeat customer base. The next year, Conine and Shah decided to take the leave an...
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Web Analytics Solutions: Google Analytics vs. Adobe Analytics

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These days, every business with an online presence has invested their time and resources into publishing content on their website, optimizing their landing pages to drive conversions, and more. It’s important for these businesses to understand and track the performance of their digital strategy, and ensuring that they are reaching the intended audience. Built With. (2019). For many businesses, Google Analytics is their solution when thinking of a tool that can track new and returning visitors, bounce rates, referral sources, and other metrics. The current consensus shows that Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics platforms out there today- with some sources reporting more than 27 million live websites currently using Google Analytics (see graph on right) (BuiltWith, 2019). The popularity of Google Analytics comes to no surprise, as it provides a powerful suite of tools for businesses any stage, and it is used by big names- of course, even Google itself. There...
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Keyword Hero with Google Analytics

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Google Analytics is a great resource for any business who owns a website. It provides useful data about the visitors on a website, their activity and behaviors, and trends over time. Google tries to provide multiple metrics for analytics users- with one exception: organic search term report.   Although the report is still available for users to see, an increasing number of results on this report is listed as “not provided”- a result of Google’s decision to encrypt the keyword information in Google Analytics (Modassic Marketing, 2019). This decision was made in October 2011 to protect the privacy of the users and adopt stronger security standards (Google, 2011). Though this was a great move for the user experience and security, this encryption has left holes in the data in the analytics report, leaving marketers to look to other metrics to help them understand their traffic and know the ROI of their SEO strategies. Fortunately for the SEO industry, a modern problem broug...
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Social Media: Which platform is right for your business?

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In its infancy, social media was designed to connect people- but has since transformed into one of the most used business tools that allow brands of all sizes to increase their brand awareness and engagement. With the ability to offer free organic marketing or paid targeted marketing, social media platforms has taken the center stage and become a big part of big brands’ marketing channel mix. Social media continues to grow rapidly. The number of people using the top platform in each country has increased by almost 1 million new users every day during 2018- totaling more than 3.26 billion social media users each month in 2019 (Kemp, 2018-19). With more than 200 social media sites available (see left) to the public, it may be hard for a business to distinguish which ones they should be present on. It’s easy to feel pressured to be on all of the platforms, but a company should consider a few key points before integrating social media into their marketing campaigns. Like any market...
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What is Referral traffic and why is it important?

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Understanding where your potential consumers are coming from is a key aspect of optimization. If you have ever studied digital marketing, I am sure you’ve heard the words “organic,” “direct,” and “referral” in relation to the traffic on your website. Search engine optimization (SEO), paid media placements,  pay per click advertisements (PPC), blogging, social media, and more, helps increase the amount of traffic to a website (Kiel, 2019). Web Analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics, divides the traffic from these sources and categorizes them into organic, direct, or referral traffic. Organic traffic is traffic that comes directly from search engines, while a direct traffic visitor arrives directly without coming from anywhere else on the web. Forms of direct traffic include clicking on a bookmark, or links from documents that don’t include tracking variables, such as PDFs or Word documents (Alexander, 2016). Although all traffic is important, one often overlooked traffic c...
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Bounce Rate: Is the content relevant to the audience you are attracting?

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According to the Web Analytics Association, “bounce rate” is the single page view visits divided by entry pages. Essentially, a “bounce” occurs when someone visits your website, views a single page, and leaves with no engagement with other pages on the website. Marketers can find their bounce rate on their web analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. If one looks into their Google Analytics, for example, and sees the average bounce rate for a page is 50%, then that means that 50% of the people coming to their website leave after viewing only the page they entered on (Capstick, 2018). Bounce rate is important, but it is not everything. The initial implication of high bounce rates is unfavorable. Avinash Kaushik, a digital marketing professional, states that a high bounce rate shows that “the content on your site didn’t match what the visitor was looking for so they left without viewing another page. Pages with a high bounce rate are not delivering on th...
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