There are many tools in a detective’s bag. Not all investigators are Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass and funny hat. Real detectives have fingerprint matching, forensics, DNA testing, polygraph machines, facial recognition technology — and yes, they can wear a deerstalker too, if they so choose.
For most brands, working with retailers creates blind spots in their marketing and sales data. They can’t tell what happens when someone leaves their website, so they can’t really evaluate the success or failure of their campaigns. They might see a spike in sales from Target.com after a major promotion they ran, but can’t attribute that revenue to their marketing assets.
That’s why PriceSpider’s shoppable Where to Buy solution features its own detective bag of tracking tools that closes these gaps in data. When visitors leave your website, universal tracking ensures you don’t forfeit your ability to track and analyze their purchasing behavior. While there are numerous applications of Where to Buy universal tracking, they all fall into four categories:
- Campaign tracking
- Performance tracking
- Sales tracking
- Retargeting enablement
They’re really quite elementary, my dear Watson. Here’s the breakdown (no funny hats required).
Campaign tracking
Imagine you’re a home inspector evaluating the pros and cons of a house to help a client decide whether they should buy it. Now imagine if you had to base your entire assessment of the house on a single room. You can’t get on the roof, climb into the attic, open the cupboards, access the crawl space, or test the pipes.
That’s what it’s like when most brand managers try to evaluate their ecommerce marketing campaigns. They’re working from incomplete data because they’re only able to connect their ads, Facebook posts, emails, and other marketing assets to sales that occur through their direct-to-consumer store.
Where to Buy lets you calculate your campaign’s actual return on investment. Regardless of where the sale takes place, you can trace it back to your marketing efforts using last-click attribution.
You can also use Where to Buy campaign tracking to evaluate campaigns, channel partners, and retailers. Create and assess the effectiveness of shorter paths to purchase (three-click, two-click, even one-click to cart options) or use multi-parameter campaign tracking for greater analysis of media channels, campaigns, ad types, and retailers. Sky’s the limit.
Performance tracking
Adding a Where to Buy button to your product page is a big change; you’re splitting traffic between multiple distribution channels rather than driving everyone to your direct-to-consumer store or one specific seller. Obviously, you’ll want to know how it’s impacting sales.
Performance tracking makes it easy to tell if Where to Buy is having a positive impact on conversions. Depending on retailer partnerships and which tracking solutions are activated, every time a website visitor clicks through your Where to Buy and buys from a retailer, it can record things like:
- Where to Buy impressions
- Click-throughs
- Conversion rates
- Sales
- What they bought
- Where they bought it
- How much they spent
From one convenient dashboard, Where to Buy can show you clicks and conversions on each product page with a high-level view of where your visitors are going and how much they’re spending. With a little digging, you can also explore which retailers are doing a better job driving customers to the rest of your catalog and who’s driving your traffic to your competitors.
Sales tracking
Where to Buy’s universal tracking capabilities have global reach with local precision. PriceSpider’s ever-expanding retail network allows us to collect data from more than 30,000 retailers and sellers, including all major retailers in the US and EU. If we don’t already have partnerships with your sellers, let us know whose data you need, and we’ll work with them. Our goal is to enable you to track every sale anywhere they occur online.
Retargeting enablement
Where to Buy doesn’t add a retargeting pixel to your website, but if you have a Facebook Pixel, Google Remarketing Tag, or another retargeting pixel on your website, it allows you to refine your targeting based on a shopper’s engagement with Where to Buy and sales data.
For example, maybe you want to retarget people who visit your product pages, but you want to rule out anyone who purchased your product from any of your channels. Or perhaps you want to upsell these customers with add-ons and related items. You can also target people based on where they’ve purchased from, so your ads can take customers directly to their preferred retailers.
When customer behavior from data informs your ad campaigns, you can get a lot more creative about who you target and what they see.
Start tracking sales
Want help tapping into Where to Buy’s universal tracking suite of capabilities? Let us know. And if you don’t already have this powerful ecommerce optimization tool, schedule a demo today.
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