Monday, March 2, 2015

“Powered by Service”: Zappos and the use of Web Analytics


Zappos is a leading online retailer that started out as an online shoe retailer named ShoeSite.com. Founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn, the initial inspiration came when he couldn’t find the right pair of shoes at his local mall. Swinmurn was able to get Tony Hsieh and Alfre Lin on board after he mentioned that footwear in the U.S. is a $40 billion market (Wikipedia, 2015). After the official launch of the company in 1999, the name was changed to Zappos (a variation of “zapatos,” the Spanish word for shoes). In 2001, Zappos more than quadrupled their yearly sales, and then in 2002 they opened their own fulfillment center in Kentucky. The company is headquartered in Las Vegas.


The Zappos Approach: Tools and Techniques of the Trade
As a premier online retailer, Zappos manages multiple web-based sites including blogs, social media, and of course the actual ecommerce site, Zappos.com. Managing multiple digital channels along with a huge ecommerce site, it is important to Zappos to understand how customers engage with the product and customer service representatives, to make sure that they are managing their return on investment (ROI). When you have as many channels to manage and measure as Zappos does, you need to understand which ones are more successful and why.

According to Zappos, they take the analytics data they gather about what customers view on the site and “dumb it down” through the product recommendation engine, to pitch ads for a general range of products that the consumer is likely to buy (Demery, 2012). Their theory is that creating targeted ad content that shows people exactly what they have searched for on the site, is more likely to convert to sales. However, Zappos does try to steer away from producing ads that are too highly personalized to not be overly “creepy” to their customers. (Creepy… Their words, not mine).

Ecommerce Analytics
Zappos uses a variety of third party service providers such as Google Analytics, although a recent job posting for a Web Analytics manager for Zappos states that employees must be familiar with WebTrends, and Omniture as well. Using these web analytics tools will help the company better understand visitor traffic especially when determining where in the buying process customers may leave the site and what are specific areas of interest to them. Through the use of tracking data from these tools, Zappos was able to determine that approximately 75% of their sales has come from repeat customers (which shows a very high level of customer loyalty to the brand) (Quesenberry, 2010). At one point in Zappos’ history, most of their customers heard about Zappos through Word of Mouth (WOM) or online advertising. Do you think that is still the case with Zappos? On the other hand, print advertising makes up a surprisingly small percentage of their overall media spend (Because let’s be honest, how many print ads for Zappos have you seen?)

Social Media and Blog Analytics
Data about customers is collected from many of the Zappos’ other online and digital ventures including social media, blogs, and their Associates Program, which allows other people to promote Zappos through text links, banner ads, and other methods (Zappos, 2015). Zappos also offers a large number of niche blogs with a range of topics, which obviously appeals to different customers with different interests. The variety of these blogs is meant to help create a community for Zappos enthusiasts of different interest backgrounds. Google Analytics is used to track the interactions on these blogs, including which articles are the most popular and which blogs bring in the most traffic. Just like we have discussed in previous assignments about how blogs can use Google Analytics data, Zappos can use this data to better understand how their blogs are being consumed by their customers, and to see if the blog content is producing conversions on the main ecommerce site. Producing this blog content can help boost SEO and keep Zappos at the top of search engine results.

Along with blogs, Zappos has a significantly large presence on social media and uses it as a tool to track visitors and consumer interests. Facebook and Twitter are the two main channels that Zappos utilizes to drive customers to the site; However, Twitter is more often used as a customer service tool than an advertising tool. Zappos has a large paid advertising effort on Facebook and uses Facebook insights to help drive the company’s content strategy on the main site.

Although Facebook is considered a top channel for Zappos, they have started looking in to other channels to help monetize their social engagements. Enter a new tool called PinPointing, which turns Pinterest activity into shopping recommendations. The tool is still relatively new and no formal data has been made public (at least not that I could find), but it’ll be interested to see the web analytics data for this tools plays out and translates to revenue (McGee, 2012).

Data Usage: How does Zappos use this data?
According to the Zappos Privacy Policy, the main ecommerce site uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to provide the most secure shopping experience possible (2015). Zappos does however, collect a variety of information in many different ways from the customers. In their privacy policy, Zappos says they use their customer’s personal information in the following ways:
  •      To help make the site easier for customers to use by not having to enter information more than once.
  •      To help customers quickly find information, products, and services.
  •      To help Zappos create content that is the most relevant to its customers.
  •      To alert customers to new information, products, and services that are offered.

Zappos also takes their social data and integrates it in to the overall CRM strategy. Since social media is the first line of customer service, they monitor public mentions of Zappos and use sentiment analysis to uncover customer service opportunities as well as to get a feel for the overall brand perception. Zappos is continually searching for ways to use the social data for a more integrated CRM purpose by better understanding the connection between a fan’s engagement on Facebook and their behavior on the site. Zappos feels that they can give a better customer experience if they are able to associate a social fan with a customer on record on the site (Abramovich, 2012). According to Nate Luman, the Facebook Marketing lead at Zappos, they use Fan-page-user-overlap data to help branch out in the audiences they target with their ads. By using this tool, they can reach audiences who are similar but “not-so-obvious”. Fan-page insights inform Zappos’ content strategy. They optimize for engagement and track the type of content that prompts the most likes, comments and shares.

Perspectives
Zappos does an extremely good job at tracking their customers and using web analytics to help create more targeted ads. The large collection of user data helps to deliver extremely targeted ads to the customers. While it seems that Zappos may not need any additional assistance in the matter, there are a few recommendations I can make to improve their overall web analytics efforts.

Zappos offers thousands of products, from shoes to clothing and accessories. They have dedicated shops to specific interest areas. It is VITAL that the homepage continue to produce these interest areas that customers are attracted too. This data is collected from Google Analytics and insights from Facebook and other social media channels.


Making these shops easily accessible will provide the customer with a great user experience.

Looking at Zappos’ blog content, they could consider having guest blog posts by “industry experts” in the various areas in which they blog about. For example, on their running focused blog, they could invite a professional runner or coach to write about the best shoes for running. Zappos would work with this professional coach/runner to promote the blog post through the various social channels which would invite the author’s network to view the blog when they might not have done so before, and gives Zappos fans the opportunity to hear from an expert.

Zappos does many things right on their site by having video content on many pages in the form of a product description, as well as social sharing options that allow customers to share links to the items they are interested in so their friends and followers can see. Directly linking to Pinterest and allowing you to pin items directly to Pinterest boards is a key way in which Zappos can work to monetize Pinterest in the future.

Zappos is still one of the top ecommerce sites around and offers innovatives concepts that help sell the product they carry. Zappos has great WOM marketing, great customer service (which leads to the WOM marketing), and interesting ways to continue bringing people to their site even if it’s just to read some of their blog content. By continuing to do targeted ads for products that people just viewed on the site and not getting overly “creepy” in their advertising, Zappos will continue to be a heavy hitter in the internet retailer world.


Sources:

Abramovich, G. (2012, June 28) How Zappos Made $3.50 per $1 spent on Facebook Ads. DIGIDAY. Retrieved from http://digiday.com/brands/how-zappos-makes-3-50-per-1-spent-on-facebook-ads/

Demery, P. (2012, October 19). How Zappos balances privacy and targeted ads. Internet Retailer. Retrieved from https://www.internetretailer.com/2012/10/19/how-zappos-balances-privacy-and-targeted-ads

McGee, M. (2012, August 29). PinPointing: Zappos’ Clever New Tool to Monetize Pinterest. Marketing Land. Retrieved from http://marketingland.com/pinpointing-zappos-clever-new-tool-to-monetize-pinterest-20142

Quesenberry, K. (2010, March 23). Walk a Mile in Zappos’ New Media Shoes. Post Control Marketing. Retrieved from http://www.postcontrolmarketing.com/?p=52

Wikipedia. (2015). Zappos. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zappos

Zappos. (2015). Privacy Policy: Protecting your Personal Information. Retrieved from http://www.zappos.com/protecting-your-personal-information

Zappos. (2015). Zappos.com Associates Program. Retrieved from http://www.zappos.com/associates-program

Zappos Labs. (2015). PinPointing: Exploring the future of Zappos. Retrieved from http://labs.apps.zappos.com/#welcome



Monday, February 23, 2015

In a Google and Digital world, is there really such a thing as privacy?

Every time you click on a website, post on social media, use a mobile app and comment via email or even make a phone call, your data is collected for future use (Martin, 2014). This is essentially what others may call your “digital footprint.” This tracking of everything users do online has many consumers concerned about what is being inferred about them every time they do anything online. As more and more companies and business sectors collect data of one form or another on their users, how can we be assured that our digital footprint is safe and private? Truthfully, I don’t think we can. Is this ethical? Probably not.

So how does a company like Google play in to this whole digital footprint I mentioned? Google owns a myriad of products such as:
  • A top-ranked search portal (this would be Google.com… duh)
  • A popular (and widely used) email service (Who doesn’t used Gmail these days in some way?
  • A VERY highly ranked analytics and reporting tool (Google Analytics)
  • The largest distributed ad network (Google AdWords)
  • Social media networks and a blogging platform (Blogger and Google+)
  • An online chatting tool (Gchat and Hangouts)
  • The ever popular (and largest) video content hosting site (YouTube)
  • Cloud storage and document sharing (Google Drive)
  • A Smart Phone operating system (Android)

And so much more… And every single one of these products or services provides Google with information about you that they can use. Google can collect a little bit of data about you from each and every one of the services I listed above, and they do almost effortlessly by integrating in to people’s lives so easily that people have begun to depend on them.

I’m not writing this blog post to say that Google is “evil” or anything of that matter; In fact, I actually really like (and in many cases use) many of the Google products.

So what am I writing this blog post about? There have been many discussions in the news about Google in regard to privacy, security, and ethics and I wanted to share some of my findings.

Google and Privacy
Many people say that Google has no privacy policy, and it has even been reported in some cases that Google said that user of their products had “no legitimate expectation of privacy” (del Castillo, 2013). Google openly admits to collecting information in two ways: Information that is given to them and information they get from the use of their services (Google, 2015).

Information that is given to them includes any personal information you use to sign up for a Google account such as your name, email address, telephone number, and in some cases a credit card. Also, if you take advantage of some of the social sharing options they offer, this personal information can include your name and photo.

Then there is the information that Google gets about you from the use of their services. Google states in their policy that they “collect information about the services that you use and how you use them.” This information can be broken down into roughly six different kinds of information that Google clearly states in their Privacy and Terms of Service statement:

  1. Device Information: Google collects device-specific information such as hardware model, operating system version, mobile network information, and in some cases may associate your device with a phone number and your Google account.
  2. Log Information: When you use a Google service or content that is provided by Google, they will collect and store certain information such as details of how their service was used (search queries), IP Addresses, device event information, and cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or Google Account (this information is likely used for Google Analytics data in some cases)
  3. Location Information: Google uses various technologies such as IP addresses, GPS, and other devices that may provide Google with information on nearby devices such as Wi-Fi access points and cell towers (Google maps anyone?)
  4. Local Storage: Google may collect information locally from your device using browser web storage and application data caches.
  5. Cookies and anonymous identifiers: When you visit a Google service, a cookie or anonymous identifier may be sent to your device. This data can be used for advertising services or Google services that appear on other sites.
  6. Unique application numbers: Certain services include a unique application number, and this information may be sent to Google when you install or uninstall these services. These can be sent to the Google servers to help alert you to updates necessary
So Google tracks everything you do, how much does this bother you? Should we be concerned? Is it time to give up on online privacy all together?

Trying to maintain privacy today is really difficult, and in many times can be really time consuming, complicated, and even exhausting. Everything these days is collecting data on you, and it’s not just Google. Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon can be considered just as guilty. If this is the case, then why do people continue posting the most personal things on a variety of social networks, but get really upset when there is a Google Ad presented to them based off of their browser history.

And my honest opinion on all of this? Sure, if Google wants to track me, good for them because all their going to find about me is that I run a lot and may have a slight obsession with shoes and cat memes. I am a fan of all of Google’s products and services and how they easily integrate in to my life and help me lead a more organized and social one at that. 

Think about it, where would we be without the Google search engine? I mean yes, we have Yahoo! And Bing, but who says they aren’t tracking you as well? Truth is, they probably (and most definitely) are it is just that Google has laid out this huge network of products and services that it is hard to avoid every single aspect.

So to answer the big question in this weeks assignment, how do I feel about the fact that Google collects data from millions of accounts every day and should we be concerned about it or is it just the price we have to pay to reap the benefit of Google’s great services. In this instance, I am going to say that Ignorance is bliss and I personally have no huge issues with Google.

In the end, if you want to keep something private, DON’T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET. It is as easy as that.

Source(s):
del Castillo, M. (2013, August 15). 6 Kinds of your information Google openly admits to collecting. Upstart Business Journal. Retrieved from http://upstart.bizjournals.com/news/technology/2013/08/15/6-data-categories-google-collects.html?page=all

Google. (2015). Privacy & Terms: Information we Collect. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infocollect

Martin, E. (2014, March 27). The Ethics of Big Data. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/emc/2014/03/27/the-ethics-of-big-data/