How Toys"R"Us is using Web Metrics

I am sure you all have heard of Toys “R” Us, the big box toy retailer that has been around since 1978. They have approximately 877 brick and mortar Toys“R”Us and Babies“R”Us stores in the United States and more than 685 international stores (Toys“R”Us, 2013). In addition to their traditional retail stores they also have an ecommerce site selling the same products they offer in store and even more. Their site is quite robust showing offerings of toys, baby gear, furniture, game systems, clothing and more.

As a parent I tend to visit this store online around the holidays so it came to mind when I was thinking of online retailers utilizing analytics. The site is set up with so many components but I will focus on four main parts of how they use their website analytics to target customers and enrich their shopping experiences.

 

On the home page:

·      Hot Sellers – this section is a list of the products that are selling quite frequently. The way they are populating this category is by looking at all purchases both online and off at their stores and having it display here. The goal of this section may be to help those who are at a loss deciding on a gift idea for someone.

·      Recommended for you – this section is generated based on both your past shopping history with the “R”Us stores as well as your past browsing history. The website saves a visitors information each time they visit the site whether they are just browsing or actually completing a purchase. The next time you come back to the home page it populates this section with similar items. 

·      Now Trending – this section is items that are gaining popularity and are getting a lot of traffic. Again it is populated based on the general browsing of people on the website and is auto generated.

On individual product pages:

·      Customer’s Also Liked – this section is on each individual product page after the item and description. It was created to see what those who have shopped for have also looked at based on this product and their interests. 

Each of these features is designed to enrich the shopping experience and show you items you may not have otherwise found. In the customer’s view it is a great way to find the products related to your purchasing interests that you might not have otherwise found among thousands of products. From a marketers perspective it is a great way to cross sell to your customers. Let’s take a look at the privacy policy and what that actually means as far a web analytics is concerned.

Their Privacy Policy - How are they using the data they collect?

What information does Toys"R"Us collect?

Information you provide them with when interacting with Toys"R"Us including when you:

• Make an online or in-store purchase;
• Create or edit Registries and Wish Lists;
• Participate in a contest, sweepstakes or other promotion;
• Download an application;
• Participate in a game or other promotion on a Toys"R"Us Site or at one of their partner's websites;
• Fill out a survey or questionnaire;
• Sign up for their rewards program or other program or club;
• Sign up for email and/or SMS news and alerts;
• Engage with Toys"R"Us content through third-party social networking sites;
• Purchase a product as a result of visiting a Toys"R"Us Site, such as through their partner i-Parcel;
• Set up the parental controls for the Tabeo tablet; or
• Contact a Toys"R"Us customer service representative.

Automatic Information Collection

Every time someone visits the Toys"R"Us website, the websites of any of their partners, or uses any of their mobile apps, they automatically collect certain types of information including:

• Your internet service provider's address, your internet protocol or IP address, the web page from which you came, your web browser software, the type of handheld or mobile device used to link to the web page, and the language settings on your web browser;
• A record of your activity or your "clickstream" while visiting Toys"R"Us Sites;
• "Cookies" of different types to recognize your computer.
• Web beacons, match scripts, pixel tags or similar technologies that allow them to know if a particular web page was visited, an e-mail opened, links in the email utilized or if the advertisements on the Toys"R"Us Sites or other sites were effective. In some instances, these technologies may allow them to match activities with particular users; and
• Collect any information you enter, share or that can be obtained from your use of their apps, games, contests, or promotions.

How does Toys"R"Us use and share personal information?

Using Your Personal Information

According to their website, “Your personal information is used by Toys"R"Us and others to enhance your customer relationship, respond to your requests, improve our customer service, tailor offerings and advertisements to you, communicate with you about products, services, special offerings and events or programs offered by Toys"R"Us or our marketing partners that may be of interest to you. We participate in interest-based advertising and we or others may use information about you to deliver to you or allow you to see certain advertising based on your interests, searches you perform, information you provide, or your activity on Toys"R"Us Sites or other websites.

Toys"R"Us may also use this information to analyze and manage its businesses. Aggregate or combined data is collected from online and offline facilities and may be used to enhance the ability of Toys"R"Us to communicate with you and to support business functions such as fulfillment, internal business processes, marketing, authentication, customer service, fraud prevention, and public safety and legal functions.” (Toys"R"Us, 2013).

About Toys"R"Us Advertising

“Toys"R"Us may participate in interest-based advertising. Toys"R"Us may automatically collect information regarding how you browse websites, use apps, play games, and shop in order to enhance your customer experience, improve our customer service, and provide you with communications and promotions from us or others. The goal of interest-based advertising is for Toys"R"Us or its advertising partners to show you ads that are more relevant to your interests.” (Toys"R"Us, 2013).

Additional Analytic Methods

            One great option I would implement as a marketing expert focusing on web analytics is either a rating system or like button on each product. In order for this to work it would have to be present when you scroll over the item on the full pages of listings (see below).

What would happen is as people see a product that they want to purchase or even have already purchased they could rate or like the item. This would help to track items that are hot that may have been purchased else ware or that people are “wishing” for.

References

Privacy Policy. (2013) Toys“R”Us. Retrieved December 9, 2013, from

http://www.toysrus.com/helpdesk/index.jsp?display=safety&subdisplay=privacy

Home Page. (2013). Toys“R”Us. Retrieved December 9, 2013, from

http://www.toysrus.com/shop/index.jsp?categoryId=2255956&ab=TRU_Header: Utility2:TRU-Logo:Home-Page

Google Analytics – Goals, Filters & Funnels

As we move through the applications of Google Analytics it is important to touch on three concepts that will give you valuable information about your website. Each of these, goals, filters, and funnels can help you to gain insight on your visitor’s behavior and how their visits match up to your website and business goals. So let’s take a look at what these three things are and how they can be valuable to you.

What is a Goal?

In life you have goals. What do you want to achieve by the time you are 30, 40, and 50? Where do you want to love? What kind of contributions do you want to make to society? 


Just as we all have goals in life we must also have goals in business in order to be successful. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics provide us with a platform to set some goals, measure them and report on them. We can set our goals and review them periodically to make sure that our websites are performing the valuable task they are made for, generating business.


“A goal is a Web site page that helps generate conversions for your site (with some extra code, they can even be file downloads or on-page actions).” (Lesson 6, 2013). According to Google Analytics, “Goals” can help you to measure how well your target objectives are being fulfilled (Google, 2013).

Some samples of goals can be:

• Thank you page (after someone completes something, download or sign up)
• Confirmation page after order
• About Us page
• A specific page such as a news article
  

Goals are also grouped in sets automatically and you have the ability to categorize them in to functional groups. 

How Many Goal Types are there?

There are four different types, URL Destination, Visit Duration, Pages/Visit, and Event, and each can be useful depending on your business goals and objectives.  

URL Destination – The location that you want people to get to such as mysite.com/veryimportant (the location that is the goal)

Visit Duration – How long are people spending on your website (you can define what is an acceptable amount of time) 

Pages/Visit – This is useful to determine how many pages people need to visit on your site for it to be meaningful to your business.

Event – What action do you want your visitor to complete? (Lesson 6, 2013)

What is a Filter?

“Filters are applied to the information coming into your account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide accurate reports. These filters can be set up to exclude visits from particular IP addresses, to report only on a subdomain or directory, or to take dynamic page URLs and convert them into readable text strings. Google Analytics provides you with three predefined filter parameters based on either Include or Exclude filtering logic.” (Lesson 6, 2013). 

There are three predefined filters each with an exclude/include feature.

1. Exclude/Include only traffic from the domains – for specific domains

2. Exclude/Include only traffic from the IP addresses – single or multiple addresses

3. Exclude/Include only traffic to the subdirectories – for a specific subdirectory of your site 

In addition you can create custom filters depending on your needs. These include:

1. Exclude Pattern – matching file lines are ignored

2. Include Pattern - matching file lines are the only ones included in reports

3. Lowercase/ Uppercase – makes fields either uppercase or lowercase

4. Search & Replace – does just that, searches and replaces

5. Advanced – you can build a new field by combining other fields

Why Should You Use a Filter?

Filters should be used to exclude internal traffic from your reporting to give you a more accurate overview. Also, they are great at tracking activity for a specific directory. Finally they are useful at tracking subdomains and comparing reports (Google, 2013).

What is a Funnel?

 “A funnel represents the path you expect visitors to take on their way to converting to the goal. Defining these pages allows you to see how frequently visitors abandon goals, and where they go. For example, funnels in an e-commerce goal may include the first page of your checkout process, then the shipping address info page, and finally the credit card information page. “ (Lesson 6, 2013).

Google says that funnels show how your marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions. This can be incoming blogs, paid search, advertising, etc. The funnel shows how these channels get people to your site and what they do from there (Google, 2013).

Following the conversion paths as well as the sequence of interactions that lead up to each transaction and conversion generates the reports. The channels included are:

1. Paid and organic search (on all search engines along with the specific keywords searched)
2. Referral sites
3. Affiliates
4. Social networks
5. Email newsletters
6. Custom campaigns that you’ve created, including offline campaigns that send traffic to vanity URLs” (Google, 2013).
   

Wrapping it up

As you can see Google Analytics offers myriad options for your business. These three we looked at today, Goals, Filters and Funnels can help you to drill down to understand some basics where your people are coming from as well as determining whether or not your website is doing what you want it to do.

These can track your most important elements and help you to see if and when you need to make some adjustments in order to help your customers complete their conversion cycle.


References


About Goals. (2013). Google. Retrieved December 3, 2013 from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012040?hl=en
 

About View Filters. (2013). Google. Retrieved December 3, 2013 from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en
 

About Multi-Channel Funnels. (2013). Google. Retrieved December 3, 2013 from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1191180?hl=en&ref_topic=1191164
 

Lesson 6: Successful Approaches in Google Analytics. (2013). WVU IMC, P.I. Reed School of Journalism. Retrieved December 3, 2013, from https://learn.wvu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_group=courses&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2FdisplayLearningUnit%3Fcourse_id%3D_1678_1%26content_id%3D_102553_1%26framesetWrapped%3Dtrue