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Multichannel Retailing - Benchmarking Performance
June 22, 2006
I spoke at Retail Week's Achieving Multichannel Integration in Retail conference this morning on Measuring and Benchmarking Performance in Multichannel Retail. I likened measuring the impact of online marketing on online sales to the holy grail for online marketers.
Alas, I wasn't able to quantify the impact of online research and spend on offline behaviour but did find some really interesting examples of the impact of offline campaigns and promotions on online spend that I will share here.
The first set of examples I presented were designed to illustrate the impact of catalogue mailings on online behaviour. I gave examples of M&M Direct, La Redoute and Boden. In the interest of space, I will stick to M&M Direct here. As the following chart illustrates, M&M Direct experienced an increase in visits the first week of October last year, several weeks before the natural seasonal spike at Christmas. The spike was a result of mailing the catalogue.
Businesses that distribute catalogues can benchmark their success at driving traffic to their website from a mailing against competitors - offering a useful benchmark.
I also presented examples of offline promotions that impacted online behaviour. One example was Debenhams, which experienced a tremendous lift in visits in conjunction with the "Debenham's Spectacular" before Christmas last year. Visits to Debenhams spiked the week to the 19th of November, earlier than the Apparel and Accessories category. Visits more than doubled in one week for Debenhams. Offline and in-store promotions for the Spectacular had a direct impact on visits.
The last example I'll share here from the presentation is based on search data. Last Christmas, Carphone Warehouse heavily promoted the Pink Motorola Razor phone. The following chart shows searches for "motorola v3 pink" and searches for "carphone warehouse". There was a strong correlation between searches for the handset and the retailer, indicating that Carphone Warehouse enjoyed a lift in brand searches in part due to the promotions it ran for the handset. Also, a search term suggestion report for "carphone warehouse" reveals that the top handsets associated with the retailer were Nokia 880 and the Motorola Pink Razor.
Whilst benchmarking performance in a multichannel environment is not easy, there are certainly some metrics that can be used. Retailers can benchmark the share of visits to their own site compared to competitors during promotions, sales or mailings. As well as benchmarking visits, retailers can benchmark the change in share of visits - as a measure of relative growth. Search data can also be extremely insightful. For example, measure the association of your brand with the products you promote and watch closely as that changes during ad campaigns.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 05:38 PM
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Comments
Marshall, thanks for your comment and I enjoyed reading your post on benchmarking multi-channel performance. I agree, our data is a great way to measure and benchmark effectiveness of multi-channel retailing. The other two methods I suggested at the Retail Week conference were Loyalty cards and reserve online to pick up in-store.
In answer to your question, unfortunately I don't know of other ways to identify downstream traffic - other than, as you say, offsite links.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | June 25, 2006 12:29 AM
I did a post on the multichannel measurment using Hitwise as it's an interest of mine.
Out of curiousity, besides your product, is there any way to detect where traffic (clickstream) goes after they leave a site (when there are no offsite links that are clicked)- just normal behavior.
Posted by Webmetricsguru | June 24, 2006 06:41 AM