Prioritize Your Time and Maximize Your eCommerce Efforts
Guest Poster: Ahin Thomas, President & CEO, Vintner’s Alliance
I went cherry picking last weekend. As I walked up to my first tree, bucket in hand, I noticed that the other pickers focused mainly on the lower branches, even though they’d been picked almost clean and the high branches were loaded with fruit.
As I tried grabbing the almost-out-of-reach fruit off the taller branches, I realized that even the small children were picking faster than me. I guess there’s a reason people talk about focusing on the “low hanging fruit.”
The same principle holds for eCommerce efforts. Although the landscape of website traffic isn’t quite as transparent as a cherry orchard, tools like Google Analytics (GA) can help you focus your efforts – and go after the traffic that’s most important to your site.
Using GA, you can see where the traffic to your site is coming from- on the left hand side, underneath ‘Traffic Sources’ select Sources > All Traffic. Check out the screenshot below of our traffic statistics:
Working on Facebook is fun and interesting. But why would I focus on the 5th most important thing before the more effective items in front of it? Don’t get distracted by the things that are harder to reach when there’s still plenty of low hanging fruit.
For instance, when we looked at where our traffic was coming from, where our customers actually are (as opposed to where I hope or thought they would be), we saw almost 25% coming from Google Search (#1 above, Google/Organic). Knowing that, we launched a paid search campaign on Google. Quickly, that became one of our leading sources of traffic (#3 above, Google / CPC), and it led to a 14% traffic increase. For wineries, a 14% traffic increase is proven to provide a 10% REVENUE increase.
Similarly, as we dug into our Analytics, we saw a number of people who left our site without converting (for us, a conversion is a phone call, for wineries it’s a sale). So we launched a retargeting campaign (#4 above, Dotomi.com). Retargeting is the process of targeting advertising to people on the web AFTER they have left your website without buying. Retargeting in this manner has led to another 10% traffic increase for us, and for wineries, it will provide another 10% revenue increase.
For many, the effort of harvesting even the lowest-hanging fruit can be daunting. That’s where Vintner’s Alliance comes in. Vintner’s Alliance helps wineries bring in more sales to their websites. Wineries use our services because our solutions are risk-free and effective. We incur all expenses and are paid only through commissions on actual sales generated. If you’d like to learn more about how to focus your eCommerce efforts and maximize your return, figure out what the heck ‘paid search’ or ‘re-targeting’ is, or just want to grow your website sales without incurring any risk, visit us at http://www.vintnersalliance.com
Pamela is a Senior Account Manager at Nexternal and works in the Napa Valley office. She is passionate about helping her clients succeed. With 20 years' experience in the wine industry spearheading business development and marketing for various wineries including her own, plus previous years practicing general business law, Pamela is well qualified to provide the service and guidance to her clients that sets Nexternal apart from other eCommerce providers.
