Customer Conversion Tracking

I have found it to be very difficult to figure out where my customers are coming from. We have Google Analytics setup for both our website and Tindie. However, I get very confused when it comes to putting the puzzle together.

What I am most interested in is knowing what site is referring traffic to us that is leading to sales. Is this even possible? Can I track that a customer clicked on a google ad and landed on our website which then sent them to tindie which turned into a sale?

If I could tell that one site was generating more sales for us then maybe I could justify spending a little money advertising this that site.

Is this google ecommerce plug-in something that could be implemented into Tindie?
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/ecommerce#loadit

This is definitely a tricky one. I’d love to have clear tracking on every order to see where it originated from, but thats easier said than done. Let me dig into the Google API this weekend to learn more about that.

This isn’t a case of “haven’t implemented because we don’t want to display that data” but more “it’s a super hard problem with out an elegant solution.” Because it’s the later, it just hasn’t been high on our priorities. With a small team, it is very hard to do well…

I think we had this conversation a year or two ago. I think most sellers who use analytics (I do) would benefit from also being able to track goals/conversions. I would love to figure out where to focus my energies.

On the topic of reaching our customers… we have this nice CSV export that includes a long list of e-mail addresses. I have been tempted to send out my own news letters whenever we list a new product. However, I would feel slimy if I did that without having the ability to have the customer opt-out.

How do others feel about using the provided e-mail addresses for reaching previous customers?

Could we get a check box on the sales form that allows the customer to opt-out of being contacted for new product listings?

I’ve debated on that too. Technically it’s not spam if you opt them in after they’ve bought your product and allow them to opt out (but then if they buy again are they opted in again?)

I’ve asked a year or two ago for this feature – a mechanism to let buyers subscribe to the store newsletter. It should be a (1) checkbox during checkout (2) configurable URL displayed on the store and product pages as well as being sent in the order email to buyers.

Yes, it could be abused, I suppose. If that’s more of a worry than the ability of sellers to bring back previous customers and increase revenue then it would be worth the extra work to roll your own or integrate with a service ‘out there’ somehow.

I bet I could be at least doubling my monthly income if I could actually (easily) contact my buyers.

btw MailChimp is pretty nice.

As an update on this - we are now gathering data on initial referral (where did the customer originate) and referral before a purchase (what was the most immediate referral before checkout). So we are making progress on that front but need more data before we can make this actionable.

I was looking into Google Analytics last week and the hard part about digging into Google Analytics is that it doesn’t have internal referrals - it shows where a visitor comes from to the site - but lacks the internal referrals (how many people were referred to a product page from within Tindie). It would need to be a combination of referral data + browse behavior. We’re still digging into it…

On seller newsletters - we did have the mass messaging before (a long time ago). The problem was that it became spammy with sellers pushing customers to other channels for sales. This hurts everyone in the end and was why we removed it.

But agreed Mailchimp is amazing

On the messaging to customers, what types of messages would you want to send?

I would want to send:

• Discount Codes (“Thanks for be a loyal customer. Here’s a 5% discount just for you”)
• New Product Listings (“Check us out. We have a new widget.Use this coupon to get 10% off today only”)
• Holiday Thank You Cards
• Remember to review that product you purchased last week FW
• Update Notices or Known Issue Notices

Off Topic and on the topic of coupons… I was caught off guard on Cyber Monday. I setup a coupon for 10 uses. It didn’t dawn on me that one customer could purchase 5 of the same item and get a discount on all 5 and that only counted as one use. For the next cyber monday it would be nice to have the option to limit the coupon to 10 items instead of 10 uses.

@ubldit - good to know, just created a ticket for this

On the emails, we already send an email reminder to leave reviews a few weeks after the order is shipped.

The other ideas are interesting, its just a matter of figuring out how to not spam the community. One idea, We could combine all of the seller notifications into one weekly email.

Ex:

• Sellers create a notification to customers (new coupon, new product, etc)
• We combine into a list
• One day each week, send it as a type of custom newsletter to each customer

That’s a decent idea. I see that you guys already send out e-mails and then I feel like I was left out when my product isn’t on it.

The only thing that concerns me about your idea is that the e-mail would get over populated with content.

Perhaps the system could be smart. For example… (Not saying it’s a good example) If you send an e-mail out each week you could look at which category that customer purchased from… I.E. customer purchased an Audio product. Then you send only those coupons which are in the category they last purchased from. Therefore that customer would not see coupons from products in the E-Textile category.

I’m sure there are other ways it could be smart and limit the number of coupons the customer is bombarded with at one time.

I can foresee sellers abusing the system and perhaps making their prices a little higher and offering coupons each week just to be on the e-mail.

One other way may be to limit entries to the e-mails to 12 per year. You can do up to one a month or if you think one month is slower you can do 4 in a month and skip 4 other months.

You could also let customers opt-out of specific stores’ emails.

One thing to bear in mind is that as sellers we can already do this - we have everyones’ email address, we’d just need to set up opt-out and so forth ourselves. Tindie providing functionality to allow buyers to explicitly opt-in or not with a purchase would be added value; adding other mechanisms that are less useful will just result in determined sellers using the less convenient but more flexible system.

I’m 99% sure we will do this in the new year. Specifically - emailing a seller’s past customers when the seller posts a new product.

I’m interested to see what happens when we email a seller’s past customers when a new product is listed. My hypothesis, higher conversion rate than the rest of the community (assuming past customers are more like the seller than the average user). The question is how much higher…

Hello everyone,

Sorry for bringing back to life an old post… was this ever implemented?