Ultimate Direction: Using Analytics to Optimize Customer Engagement and Conversions

Ultimate Direction is a company that uses state-of-the-art materials and designs to deliver the lightest hydration packs and water belts for running and endurance sports. Founded in 1985, Ultimate Direction created and popularized the "vest" concept for carrying water, and introduced the very first women's-specific line of hydration packs. While packs can be purchased by resellers like REI and Amazon, Ultimate Direction’s primary resource for ecommerce, brand ambassador profiles, and product articles live at ultimatedirection.com (Ultimate Direction, 2018).


Fig. 1: Ultimate Direction Home Page (Ultimate Direction, 2018)

Web Analytics

The digital marketers at Ultimate Direction leverage Google Analytics (SEO SiteCheckup, 2018) for tracking web visitor engagement and ecommerce at ultmatedirection.com (Fig. 1). With this tool, Ultimate Direction can track and monitor how visitors engage with the site, what they view and what they click on, which products garner the greatest interest and by whom, and various stages of the funnel to purchase completion.

Standard metrics that Ultimate Direction will likely track in Google Analytics include transactions, revenue, conversion rate, and product revenue. Going beyond the basics, Google Analytics can help Ultimate Direction to set goals against events such as email signups or product purchases, develop and track users through pre-determined funnels, and see the most popular pages and products to identify opportunities for optimization. Diving into Ultimate Direction’s website code revealed the presence of several tracking codes and pixels that help the brand in tracking website visitors from other channels and aiding in attributing conversions to multichannel media strategies off-site, which in turn inform marketers with what customers want most, the customer journey to conversion, and factors that contribute to increased KPIs.

Customer Relationships + Inventory Management: InStockNotify

Ultimate Direction prioritizes customer relationships and ensuring the highest-demand products get to those with perceived interest in a timely and person manner. This is achieved through a website plugin called InStockNotify (Fig. 2): an app that automatically notifies Ultimate Direction customers when a product is back in stock, eliminating one of the most time-consuming and manual customer service functions. Using data on customer interactions on the website and interest in products which may be out of stock, InStockNotify takes supply and demand to the next level by essentially retargeting primed customers with automatic emails when their favored product is back in stock (InStockNotify, 2018). Integrated through Google Tag Manager and feeding data into Google Analytics, this tool leverages key customer data and helps to achieve higher conversion rates for return visitors. The software also helps marketers to identify top products, to help make decisions on external marketing investment and identify opportunities in the supply chain (Fig. 3).


Fig. 2: InStockNotify Script on UltimateDirection.com (Ultimate Direction, 2018)


Fig 3: InStockNotify Dashboard (InStockNotify, 2018)

Ultimate Direction has an opportunity to use this data in retargeting messages beyond emails and into a multichannel strategy. These customers can be retargeted on Facebook or an ad network like DoubleClick to serve ads about the products they are interested in when back in stock, if follow-up from the automatic InStockNotify emails go unanswered. This can help drive traffic back to the site to encourage primed customers to complete a transaction. Using customer data to create funnels in Google Analytics, marketers can track the specific journey of these engaged customers that have specific product needs and have indicated a desire for engagement with the company.

Facebook Attribution Pixel

Ultimate Direction also incorporates a Facebook attribution pixel to retarget website visitors with relevant ads on Facebook’s platform in order to increase conversions back on their website. The pixel fires to track site visitors, returning data that allows marketers to retarget those users with Facebook ads in the future, as well as see what they’re doing on the site once they return (Campbell, 2018). This allows Ultimate Direction to gain more insights about an active, primary audience audience, send targeted messaging to those familiar with the brand, and track the effectiveness of paid social advertising efforts. While the Facebook pixel provides ultimatedirection.com website data back in the Facebook ad platform, the pixel also ensures that specific Facebook ads can be pulled through in tracking to Google Analytics, so marketers can determine the most effective ads on the platform, and how to optimize low-performing ads based on conversion rates.

Moving beyond Facebook, Ultimate Direction has an opportunity to engage in other relevant social platforms like Instagram and Strava to perform similar retargeting activities. Instagram leverages the same audience data and pixel as Facebook, making that platform an ideal extension of the current strategy. The one drawback is that The Facebook-centric nature of current Instagram ad reporting tools means that companies are often faced with potential attribution error: it can be difficult to determine if conversions came from Instagram or Facebook posts (Davis, 2017). The Facebook Ads Manager platform has helped to solve for this with more discrete breakdowns of data to help marketers understand the impact of each platform, separately.

Funnel Analytics: Email

One of the most interesting series of metrics for Ultimate Direction to track are funnels. All marketing activities can and should be seen in terms of funnels: the idea of funnel analytics is that your target audience will go through a step-by-step flow or funnel until they make a purchase on your site (Patel, 2018). Ultimate Direction has the potential to track several funnels with Google Analytics, judging from some of the visible plugins and pixels found in the body of the site’s code. Also called UTMs, tracking codes such as that applied by email campaign programs, social, and SEM track the campaign, source, and medium of the referral to a website. A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name, which enables Google Analytics to tell you where searchers came from as well as what campaign directed them to you (Launch Digital Marketing, 2017).


Fig. 4: MailChimp and Bing Tracking Codes on ultimatedirection.com 

The first possible funnel can be related to email subscribers. Ultimate Direction uses MailChimp to manage subscribers and send product-related emails periodically. The above MailChimp tracking code is a snippet of JavaScript which enables marketers to capture impression tracking from emails to the website (Fig. 4). A funnel for an email subscriber’s journey may look like this:

1. A subscriber receives an email (Fig. 5)
2. A subscriber clicks on a CTA within the email
3. A subscriber arrives on the landing page advertising a specific product and clicks “add to cart”
4. A subscriber clicks on checkout
5. A subscriber enters personal information and finalizes the purchase

At each step of the process, a percentage of subscribers will undoubtedly drop out of the funnel. Using the MailChimp pixel to track the number of unique visitors to a landing page and throughout to their farthest step of the funnel will help marketers decipher choke points in the purchase process, barriers to entry, and opportunities to optimize messaging, user interface, or follow-up tools like shopping cart reminder emails.


Fig. 5: Ultimate Direction Email Campaign with CTA to ultimatedirection.com

Funnel Analytics: Search + Retargeting

The second funnel opportunity found in the code is for Bing (see Fig. 4). Though this pixel has since been commented out (therefore, the code is no longer active or reporting into Google Analytics), it does suggest that Ultimate Direction did leverage this in their multichannel marketing campaign. This pixel can be managed with Google Tag Manager (GTM), a free tool that helps to manage and deploy marketing tags on a website without having to modify the code (Fig. 6). Bing’s Universal Event Tracking (UET) is a powerful tool that records what customers do on a website; by creating one UET tag and placing it across your website, Bing Ads will collect data that allows you to track conversion goals and target audiences with remarketing lists (Bing Ads, 2018). A funnel for users coming from Bing may be similar to the MailChimp example above, but with the added dimension of retargeting to allow for paid search to target previous visitors to the site with relevant ads. Using the funnel and tracking the points where potential customers drop-off in Google Analytics, marketers at Ultimate Direction can determine which ad campaigns, ad groups, and ads are the most effective in driving conversions.


Fig. 6: Bing Universal Event Tracking Pixel in Google Tag Manager (Winn, 2018)

SEO Optimization

At first glance, ultimatedirection.com appears to have developed a keyword-rich site with relevant keywords on their home page, including Hydration Packs, Hydration Belts, and Water Bottles, Ultimate Direction Packs, Handheld waterbottles, h20 packs, hydration backpacks, ultra running tools. The head title exceeds the recommended 65 characters, and could be optimized to prevent truncation in Google search results. Keyword Tool revealed other top Google search terms (Fig. 7), which Ultimate Direction should consider using within interior pages of the site where relevant, such as “hydration packs for biking” and “hydration packs for running” (Keyword Tool, 2018).


Fig. 7: Popular Google Searches related to “Hydration Packs (Keyword Tool, 2018)

An opportunity for SEO optimization on ultimatedirection.com lies with alt tags. The META SEO Inspector plugin for Chrome revealed that on the home page alone, 18 images are missing alt tags. Alt tags can contain keywords to help improve overall SEO and user experience. The benefit of an alt tag is that the text displays while your website images are loading, giving users information about the content included on the page; the secondary benefit is that Google takes these keyword phrases into account when evaluating a website (Fleischner, 2017).

The website includes both an XML sitemap and robots.txt file - both are beneficial to the website’s overall SEO strategy. Sitemaps, specifically, make it easy for visitors to find content on a sites, and also enable search engines to spinder the site much quicker (Fleischner, 2017). An opportunity for Ultimate Direction is to consider developing a more descriptive sitemap that uses descriptive keywords to describe product categories. Fleischner advises marketers to include short paragraphs of descriptive text for each link, which should also contain keywords. The robots.txt file signals the Google search bot spider to crawl the site and index it. Adding the robots tag and uploading a sitemap to to Google webmaster tools is the best way to help Google find all of the content on the website (Fleischner, 2017).

Finally, using a keyword density analyzer, an opportunity for ultimatedirection.com is to add more keywords into the content of their pages (Fig. 8). Critical content keywords like “hydration” and “packs” can be leveraged more effectively in title tags to increase keyword density. Most web analysts will recommend a keyword density of 2-3% (Fleischner, 2017), whereby the results below fall short at only 1.34%.


Fig. 8: Keyword Density in Title Tags 



---

References

BigCommerce, I. (2018). InStockNotify. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from https://www.instocknotify.com/app.html
Bing Ads. (2018). Universal Event Tracking: Track conversions. Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/audience-targeting/universal-event-tracking#
Campbell, C. (2018, January 28). Facebook Ads: The Beginner's Guide to the Facebook Pixel. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from https://www.shopify.com/blog/72787269-relax-advertising-on-facebook-just-got-a-lot-easier
Davis, S. (2017, April 26). Instagram, Attributions and Ecommerce: The Savvy Social Marketer's Guide. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from https://glew.io/instagram-attributions-ecommerce-savvy-social-marketers-guide/
Fleischner, M. H. (2017). SEO made simple: Insider secrets for driving more traffic to your website. United States: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.
Keyword Tool. (2018). Keyword Planner Alternative #1 (FREE) - For SEO & Google Ads PPC. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from https://keywordtool.io/search/keywords/google/14612633?category=web&keyword=hydration%2Bpacks&country=GLB&language=en#suggestions
Launch Digital Marketing. (2017, May 10). What Are UTM Codes and How Do You Use Them? Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://www.launchdigitalmarketing.com/what-are-utm-codes/
MailChimp. (2018). Use Track with Mailchimp on a Landing Page. Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://mailchimp.com/help/use-track-mailchimp/
Patel, N. (2018, July 10). An Introduction to Analytics for Ecommerce Websites. Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://neilpatel.com/blog/intro-to-ecommerce-analytics/
SEO SiteCheckup. (2018). Search Engine Optimization Made Easy. Retrieved November 19, 2018, from http://seositecheckup.com/
Ultimate Direction. (2018). Ultimate Direction | Athlete-Inspired Hydration Packs & Water Belts. Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://ultimatedirection.com/
Winn, H. (2018, March 30). Bing Ads Conversion Tracking: Identify Suspects Of Lost Conversions. Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://klientboost.com/ppc/bing-ads-conversion-tracking/