Zara- How One Online Retailer Collects & Uses Data

   The clothing store Zara’s online shopping site collects demographic data from users from the very first interaction on the site’s home page. When visiting Zara.com you are asked to identify your country and language from drop down menus.

Once you enter your demographic information, you are taken to that country’s site (for me it was Zara United States.) From here you can shop via departments such as woman, man, kids, etc. or you can login to your account.

   For new customers, Zara asks that you create an account. Here you are asked your email address, password, first and last name, address, zip code, city/town, state, phone number, and correspondence preferences. You are also asked to accept their privacy policy. Below are segments from Zara’s privacy policy pertaining to information that they collect from visitors and how that information is used.

According to the Zara privacy policy:

We collect three types of information from you: i) information that you provide to us; ii) information we collect or receive from others; and iii) information that is derived through automated tracking mechanisms and technology.

We collect information when you register online or update your account, log-in, place an order, communicate with our customer service representatives, opt-in to receive our e-mails, shop online, request a catalog, participate in a sweepstakes, contest, promotion or survey or join our social networking sites. We may also collect information from you in our stores or through our catalogs or other marketing material. This information may include, but is not limited to, your contact information (for example, your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses and phone number) and your credit card information. If you create an online account, you also have the option of providing your product preferences and demographic information. If you use other functionalities found on our Site, or if you choose to send an e-mail from our site to a friend, we will also collect your friend's name and e-mail address …

We may collect information through automated tracking mechanisms and technology to make our Site more interesting and useful to you and for various purposes related to our business. For instance, when you come to our Site, we may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type. Such information may be used for system administration and to analyze the frequency with which visitors to our Site visit various parts of our sites; and we may combine such information with personally identifiable information.

We also use "cookies," Web beacons, and other tracking technologies…Cookies are used to track the pages of the websites you have visited and do not retain any personally identifiable information such as your name, address or any financial information. We may use cookies to, among other things, enable you to use certain Website features, remember the items in your shopping cart, store your preferences, recognize you when you return to our Website, speed up your searches, track your orders, and monitor and maintain information about your general Internet usage and use of our Website. Cookies help us to improve our Website and to deliver a better and more customized service. They allow us to customize our Website according to your individual interests. (Zara.com, 2011)

I was very impressed with this retailer’s privacy policy. I think that they do a great job of being very upfront about what data they are collecting and how that information will be used. Once users accept this privacy policy, their online account can also store more information such as favorite stores that can be conveniently shipped to, track orders, make returns easily and change account preferences.

   The information obtained by the company from users creating accounts is a marketers dream. Information can be used to track purchases, create future email correspondence, gauge the success of that email correspondence, determine the location of buyers and areas to be targeted and track shopping preferences. In my case, they also have my cell phone number to send text alerts.

    According to the privacy policy, the company not only uses the information that they obtain from you to track purchases but also to,

Maintain a record of your purchases made on our Website and combine this with information you have provided in our retail stores or over the phone in order to serve you better. We may combine information you provide with demographic information and information that is publicly available. We may also use information about your product preferences and interests in order to improve our site design and enhance your shopping experience (Zara.com, 2011).

  
Although it’s difficult to think of how this company could do any better in collecting data about its visitors I think that it could use some help in getting more visitors. For example, the company says that they have “the latest fashion for women, men and kids” (Zara.com, 2012) However, when you search Google for “women’s clothing” Zara does not come up and other retailers such as Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, New York & Company, Forever 21,Coldwater Creek and many others do. Also, the companies marketers could take advantage of ad space for search’s on “women’s clothing” similar to the companies Ann Taylor, Chico’s, White House Black Market and Zappos. Even when I specifically searched for “fashion for women” or “fashion for women, men and kids” Zara did not come up anywhere in my top results. They could definitely benefit from tracking some of their keywords and enhancing their search engine optimization.

   The company also maintains a Facebook page that has over 13 million followers and a Pinterest site. The Zara Facebook page advertises their Lookbook and sales as well as press coverage. I’m sure that they also collect data from this site, but if not they could gather information of demographics, shares and referrals as well. Zara could work on increasing engagement on their Facebook page by soliciting pictures of followers wearing Zara clothes or soliciting opinions on new fashions. They could also benefit from paid advertising on Facebook to draw more traffic to their site.

   All in all, I’d say that this company does a great job with collecting data and identifying how that data is used. Since the company is a worldwide clothing chain that is continuing to open more stores I’d say that they are benefitting from this data quite well.

References:

Zara.com (2011, September 5). Privacy Policy. Retrieved July 9, 2012 from www.zara.com

A Digital Marketers Tool Belt: Google Goals, Funnels and Filters

   As marketers it’s often difficult to justify a campaign. Determining return on investment is tough if there is no monetary return involved. How do you prove that what you are doing is working? This is where having some good tools available to provide data about consumer behaviors is invaluable. By now I have learned that the most valuable tool in a digital marketer’s tool belt is a good way to track web analytics. According to my web ninja expert Avinash Kaushik, “There is one difference between winners and losers when it comes to web analytics. Winners, well before they think data or tool, have a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Losers don't” (Kaushik, 2012).

   According to my husband, my tool expert, Craftsman makes the best tools- they are affordable, dependable and get easy to use. In my opinion, for most digital marketers Google Analytics seems to be the Craftsman of the marketing tools. It’s free, dependable and somewhat easy to use.

   After last week’s snafu with installing my Google Analytics code, I recruited some technical assistance from a trusted web colleague I learned a valuable lesson about reading web code and am happy to report that I have successfully installed my Google Analytics code and am tracking usage! Turns out that I didn’t actually flop, I just fumbled a bit. While I correctly installed the code into my Blogger code, I installed it in the wrong place so it was not capturing all of my visitors.

   I am happy to report that I have had 25 page views from 13 unique visitors! Now that I am collecting data accurately, I want more. This week I learned about Google Goals, Funnels and Filters and how these tools can provide valuable insight to marketers.

Here’s some new terminology I learned in this week’s DMC 642 lesson:

A Goal is a web site page that helps generate conversions for your site. Some examples of good conversion goals include a thank you page after a user submitted a form or a purchase confirmation.

A Funnel represents the path you expect visitors to take on their way to converting the goal (for example, adding an item to a cart, then filling out your shipping information, then your billing information on the next page, etc until your purchase is complete.

A Filter is applied to the information coming into your account to manipulate the final data in order to provide accurate reports. For example, a filter can be set up to exclude visits from particular IP addresses to not count internal user data.

                                                                                                                                    (Wells, 2012).

According to an article from Smart Insights, “Setting up goals in Google Analytics is indispensable for any business looking to get the most from their digital marketing since you:

• go beyond measuring visits to events happening on the site that show that customers have engaged with your business
• can track the value the site is generating for your business from these events
• see which traffic sources you’ve invested marketing in give rise to these goals
• review which content types and customer journeys on the site are helping achieve the go” (Chaffey, 2010).

Here are 10 examples of goals from Smart Insights.

1. Contact us forms
2. Quick enquiry forms
3. Call back requests
4. Registration forms
5. PDF Downloads
6. Product video views
7. Podcast downloads
8. Specific text links
9. Trial/Demo requests
10. Webinar/Event signups

                                                (Patel, 2012).

Aha! This week I realized that I have been using goals all along and never knew it. I never knew it because I never had the right tool for the job. I will definitely be asking our IT guy to install some goal reporting. If he’s not sure about how, I’ll direct him to this site Google Analytics Goal Set Up.

Here are some examples of what a report can look like:

(Chaffey, 2010)

(Patel, 2012)

   Once I got the basics of goals down, I moved on to funnels. Funnels are a great resource that I think most people are unaware of. This testimonial from the Google site sums it up best "Funnel reports in Google Analytics are crucial to our success. We work constantly to improve the user experience. Google Analytics gives us the insight we need to quickly see which step in the online sales process is broken so we can fix it immediately." (Google, 2012)

   Allowing companies to track where in the purchase cycle a user abandons the process is a vital tool. If the majority of users are abandoning at a particular page, knowing this allows them to look closer to see what changes can be made to smooth the process. Hmm, that got me feeling a little bad about all of the times that I added items to a cart and then came back a few days later to place the order or worse never came back at all instead called to place the order.

   Last but not least are the filter tools. I have been a friend of the filtering tools in Google Analytics for a few years. In my organization, I had a company IP address filter installed so that those employees who have our web site set as their home page would not inflate the number page views and visitors. But, until now I had only been using filters to keep people out of my data not to lump users in and gain valuable marketing information from them. This week I learned that I can use filters to help segment visitors (for example, determine how many users are coming to my site from particular domains such as Facebook or Twitter.)

  Once again, there were a lot of lessons learned this week. For those of you keeping track, I think that I have now passed my white and gold belt testing in Web Ninja Training, I am now officially an orange belt web ninja!

References:

Chaffey, D. (2010, December 3). Google Analytics Goal Set Up. Smart Insights. Retrieved July 2, 2012 from http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup/getting-to-grips-with-goals-in-google-analytics/

Google Analytics (2012). Case Study. Retrieved July 2, 2012 from http://www.google.com/analytics/customers/case_study_discount_tire.html

Kaushik. A. (2012). Digital Marketing and Measurement Model. Occam’s Razor. Retrieved July 2, 2012 from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/

Patel, P. (2012, May 30). Setting goals for B2B web marketing. Smart Insights. Retrieved July 2, 2012 from http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup/10-goals-b2b-website/

Wells, M. (2012, May 21). Lesson 6: Successful Approaches in Google Analytics. IMC 642. P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU.