Ecommerce Conversion World 2018 – Highlights

Some of the UK’s leading ecommerce professionals gathered at The Shard yesterday for the second Ecommerce Conversion World conference.

Hosted by AWA digital, attendees were treated to two talks. One from Dr Joe Gladstone, and one from Craig Sullivan. 

Dr Joe Gladstone

Dr Joe Gladstone, Assistant Professor of consumer behaviour at University College London, and regular contributor at the BBC, illustrated the power of nudges and how they can impact consumer decisions and behaviour.

He also explained how companies are now using digital footprints to predict personality types. In fact, he revealed that companies can tell a lot from your likes on Facebook (and this doesn’t mean the posts you like, it means the companies or pages you like). Predictive analytics, based on your Facebook likes, can even tell if your parents were together at the age of 21, as well as your emotional stability. To do this, they use singular value decomposition, followed by a prediction model.

This helps companies predict personality traits of their customers, and therefore the behaviour they are likely to exhibit.

You can tell from these personality traits what personalised nudges are likely to be effective for your target audience. These nudges can either be through adverts or the use of personalisation on your website.

For example, if they belong to an audience full of extroverts, they are more likely to respond to an advertisement that features an image of someone dancing, surrounded by people, in a club. Whereas an introverted audience would respond better to an advert showing one person, doing something on their own.

So in answer to the question can money buy happiness? Yes, it can – “Money buys happiness when spending fits our personality” Dr Joe Gladstone.

 

Craig Sullivan

Craig Sullivan, who has been blending UX, Analytics and A/B Testing for over 12 years for companies like Spotify and eBay, shared his insights of auditing over 480 Google Analytics accounts. His summary: over 95% of these accounts were poorly configured.

He explained that it is fundamental that data collection is correct and clean, otherwise the metrics, reports, and dashboard that you build from this data collection, will all be unreliable.

Google Analytics may well be free, but this is of absolutely no benefit to you, if you don’t ensure the data is accurate. So the price is free, but this does not mean free of effort. The audience got an insider’s view, as he shared that investment in analytics is the number one weakness of his clients.

So what are a few of the implications of poorly configured GA accounts on financials?

• Duplicate, over and under counting sales
• Counting sales that are NOT sales
• Using wrong or misunderstood metrics
• Business decision on shaky ground

Only 3 of Craig’s 480 clients had absolutely no tracking issues. Do you think you’re part of that small percentage of companies? Probably not.

So here’s what you can do to achieve what Craig calls ‘Analytics Bliss’:

1. Get an Audit such as our Google Analytics Healthcheck
2. Lean & Agile Analytics
3. Invest in Analytics
4. Define your goals clearly
5. Analytics needs a backlog
6. Train your teams – take a look at our training services

If Craig’s talk is something you’re interested in, sign up to the form on the right if you haven’t already, and we will be announcing a webinar date with Craig shortly for him to share his insights once again.

If you’re keen to learn more about how personalising your website visitors’ experience could improve your website conversion rate, or need help doing a Google Analytics audit, please get in touch.