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Brief
Growth for ghd has been nothing short of phenomenal. The hairstyling brand, famed for its straighteners, styling accessories and finishing products, has gone from a small British start-up in 2001 to a global superbrand, with a multi-million pound turnover.
But with this encouraging growth has come the challenge of moving its understanding of how customers and prospects interact with the company online, beyond the restrictions of a basic analytics package.
Until April 2008, ghd was using a combination of a traditional package with some in-house adaptations and extra capabilities, but soon realised that this approach restricted it to only understanding what poorly defined groups did on parts of the site, rather than analysing detailed individual visitor journeys through the site.
Strategy
Rob Pye, ghd web analyst, explains, “The problem with our previous, and indeed any, basic web analytics is that we spent time setting up the tags to deal with a certain enquiry or theory of ours, and then would have to wait for the user data to be accrued over days or weeks to find the answer. With Speed-Trap, absolutely all user behaviour is captured and recorded and so is available, even in real-time, for new and ongoing questions to be asked of it without need for days or weeks of notice – a far more flexible and useful approach.”
Pye continues, “The main issue with our previous ‘analytics package’ was that you were given set metrics, which sat independently of each other, and therefore only allowed you to view all your users in one, inaccurate ‘aggregated’ view. But once we had implemented Speed-Trap, we had instant user behaviour insight. We were suddenly able to ask ourselves questions we’d not previously considered. For example, how do our visitors interact with our checkout form? Is there a difference between drop-off points for natural or pay per click visitors? These are all conclusions that could not be made from the previous package from Hitbox (now Omniture), and lead to direct changes in the way we market and present our site, which in turn has a direct knock on effect with our revenue.”
Execution
The ability to dig deeper into the behaviour of users arriving on the site, through different channels, has given ghd new insight in to the success of various landing pages, allowing it to design content, which aids the user journey and improves conversion rates.
Pye explains, “Being able to view the bounce rate of different users, as opposed to just an overall bounce rate for the site, helped us to identify the most successful landing pages for each of our acquisition channels. This in turn allowed us to optimise our online marketing campaigns and ensure we were delivering the most relevant, and highest converting, landing page to our users. Speed-Trap has enabled us to become fully accountable for all our acquisition channels, and allowed us to make effective, informed, granular changes to our online marketing campaigns; ultimately, this may not have been possible without Speed-Trap.”
With this capability to find detailed answers to new questions, with existing data, ghd was recently able to go back and audit its transactional process, based upon the data recorded by Speed-Trap, from when the new ghd site was launched at the end of May 2008. Pye adds, “We had sufficient confidence in the data from Speed-Trap’s collection and analysis that we were able to react to the insight far faster than previously. Changes to the site would ordinarily have required new metrics to be devised to measure the effectiveness of the changes – to all intents and purposes second-guessing ourselves. With the Speed-Trap data this was unnecessary, as the data in front of us was so thorough, it provided a complete picture of the use of our site.”
Results
ghd has also taken advantage of Speed-Trap’s ability to gather user behaviour data from Flash applications. Normally pages containing rich graphics and video, which Flash makes possible, are impenetrable to most analytics packages, without a lot of work, but a slick, design-led brand, such as ghd, cannot afford to lose visibility of its customers when they are immersed in rich-media content such as a Flash video.
Speed-Trap’s new Flash data capture feature will acquire all the data ghd need without slowing down the delivery of video. Pye explains, “With the ability to monitor Flash, we will be able to understand these pages’ appeal and pattern of use, in exactly the same way we can the other pages, thereby gaining the complete picture of the site and also immediately appreciating our visitors’ reception of new Flash offerings on the site.”
Overall, ghd have been able to move away from looking at herd-level data, that is at best days old, and reach a point where they can understand every user’s preference and interaction with the brand – an ability that inspires customer loyalty and repeat custom. Pye concludes “If you want a tool that can provide you with the insight required to optimise your website for your users based on their actual behaviour, not your assumptions of what they do and want, then Speed Trap is definitely the software for your business. However, if you’d prefer to continue looking at a broad generalisation of your site visitors, then stick to your traditional analytics package!”
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