On The Trail

Highlight #1 of 2 for the first day of eMetrics:

Stacey Coopes from FordDirect.com is doing amazing things with her web analytics data. I wish she had had 3 hours to talk because each slide of her presentation could have been expanded into a full length talk. Here are two bits that really stood out: Simple, quick tests are more likely to pay off than major redesigns. Example: They did a major redesign of a part of their site and it fell flat, but changing the wording on a button increased conversion by up to 20%. We’ve done exactly the same things on a few sites with similar results. The take away is that simple is good and low risk, complicated is hard and high risk.

So that was neat, but the coolest bit of her talk was a very simple graph. FordDirect.com allows you to “build your car” or otherwise indicate what features you want. The graph had the percentage of website visitors who indicated an interest in a particular option (eg. V6 engines) vs. the actual sales of that particular option. It was an almost perfectly straight line. In other words the website clickpath is an almost perfect predictor of how well Ford’s various models and options will sell. If that wasn’t cool enough, Ford is actually using this to plan their production. Web analytics matters at Ford — to the tune of several billion dollars.