Imagine a potential restaurant visitor calling a place he’s never been before, asking all sorts of questions about the establishment and ultimately deciding to make a reservation elsewhere. If you’re the restaurant owner, you should be wondering what went wrong where and when, and what you can do about it. Now assume the number of people calling the restaurant and ultimately not booking grows to 10 out of 30 people who would have been ready to make a reservation if everything added up for them. Pretty important for a business to know what’s up, right?
Same thing happens with people who want to sign up for a certain web service or become a customer of an e-commerce website. Not everyone completes the process for signing up or buying something online, and the reasons can be very diverse. Website abandonment measurement and management should be high up on the priority list for any web service provider, particularly those who use the Internet to sell products, whether directly or indirectly. Evaluating the entire process that is supposed to guide a visitor towards becoming a customer should be done on a continuous basis, and it’s very important to know why people start the cycle but never finish it.
Let’s go back to the restaurant. Suppose a person who wasn’t convinced by the person answering the phone at the place hung up, turned on the radio or TV and stumbled upon an advertisement for the restaurant, making him change his mind again. I know this is an extremely unlikely scenario, but it gets more feasible when you apply this to the Web.
The above example, which you could categorize under the denominator ‘re-converting’, is pretty similar to what SeeWhy is trying to accomplish for e-commerce vendors and web application providers: try and get the abandoners (i.e. people who leave online registration or purchasing system prior to finishing the process) to come back and complete the cycle. Not 24 hours or more later, but practically in real-time.
SeeWhy has launched the free Abandonment Tracker (available as a software-as-a-service), which makes it easy to convert website visitors who had previously abandoned their shopping carts, online forms, applications and registrations. The tracker captures the unique IDs of website abandoners and then emails those IDs to the website operator for use in follow-up campaigns targeted to the abandoners. When a visitor lands on a web page again, an event is sent to SeeWhy’s data center. If the visitor doesn’t convert, SeeWhy records the abandonment along with the details, including email address, shopping cart items and amount, and stage in the conversion process at which the visitor abandoned. The whole point of the system is to recapture abandoned revenue.
Currently SeeWhy’s suite of real-time web analytic applications is being used by both large and small ecommerce companies, including Amazon.com, eBay, Land’s End, Citibank and MasterCard. The company just raised $4.5 million in funding from Scottish Equity Partners, Logispring, and Pentech Ventures.
This is an incredibly nice idea,
Only one question remain how do you get to know why without furthering annoying the user/potential customer?
We at TypeForms.,com will definitely look into this service.
The trick in following up without annoying is to pay close attention to the tone of the follow up. A service email which is helping gets a different reaction to an overt sales pitch. We can advise on this in more depth if needed.
#1 cause of abandoned shopping carts: “Click ‘add to cart’ to see price.”
I’ve worked with these guys in the past and they are top notch. Some of their avg vs actual trending software is amazing.
not sure how much rocket science there is to customer purchases even more so on the internet. maybe its because i have alot of customer service experience that i take for granted. second nature kinda thing.
WatchLocator.com – see yourself
Great idea still didnt understood what they meant by “stage in the conversion process at which the visitor abandoned”
It should be a great tool for vendors to know how much of revenue loss they have on user abandonment but still can they capture as to why they abandoned. User feedback is always tricky because as user most likely we dont see a immediate value associate with the feedback system.
If there is anyway they can instantly provide for e.g. – discount voucher for their next purchase when they point away from the page or click on the close button it should get some feedback.
How is this that different from the basic concept of Re-targeting, which has existed for years?
Also reads to me like a pay-per-post article. The companies you mention in the last paragraph aren’t listed on their web site – unless SeeWhy gave you the information to write about it
ha ha, good one!
Actually they are, read the About Us page.
It doesn’t sound so different than all the other companies doing re-targeting and behavioral advertising. They pretty much buy cookies so they know who has been where and they will server ads based on that.
As for the email piece, there are other solutions currently offered mainly by web analytics companies such as Omniture and Coremetrics.
Am I missing anything?
The big issue with this model is – are people going to get scared off when you email them and say “we see you abandoned your shopping cart…please come back”
can be a bit creepy….
Went to the website and couldnt Seewhy they would be able to predict anything new.
I definitely think that consulting services in this area would be a hit but I couldnt really get what SeeWhy is trying to do with their website…
Retargeting per se is not new, but what is clear is that very few sites do it despite it being around as a concept for a while. The reasons for this are that it looks more simple to do than it really is.
Of web analytics users today, only 9% follow up abandoners within 24 hours, and only 17% follow up at all. But 73% of those that don’t would like to if there was an easy and simple way to do it.
What SeeWhy does is make these things really simple by using advanced analytics. The results speak for themselves.
Remind me to add this domain to my block list. This is creepy.
Abandonment trackers and incentives have been around for at least 6 years now. This is nothing new.
See my comment above
Totally agree with several of the responses here…this has been around, in one form or another, for years.
Top-tier analytics vendors (i.e. Coremetrics, Omniture, WebTrends) allow you to leverage integrations with their ESP partners to remarket to process abandoners quite easily. Leveraging your existing analytics tags also negates the page weight/latency issues that come with adding another 3rd party tag set to your site.
I’d also like to point out that remarketing within a 24 hour period of the abandon event is really only for a subset of businesses (usually financial services, education providers, and non-retail lead gen).
Remarketing to “shopping cart abandoners” directly after they abandon will give you some great KPI numbers, but those results are going to be biased because of the fact that you will be remarketing to some qualified customers that were already going to come back and complete their purchase anyways without any prodding or incentives.
We’ve found that a first real time follow up works across indusry sectors, as long as the first contact is service based, not overt sales. This doesn’t canibalize any sales that are likey to convert, but undoubtedly helps to ensure that you get their business, rather than a competitor.
There’s a notable Marketing Experiments study which used a e-retailer to run a series of tests on remarketing. They concluded that best practice is an immediate follow up, with offers only being made if a conversion doesn’t subsequently take place. Analysts Forrester recently published a study agreeing.
With Abandonment Tracker Pro, SeeWhy tackles the challenge of when to make an offer, by automating the optimization of follow up treatment. In this way those that need an offer to complete get offers, but those that are likely to convert without an offer don’t.
Hmmm. the form wouldn’t let me add in the twitter account: @queensboroshirt
This is an interesting article, and fascinating to see how this is being used by larger corporations. Our custom cart software lets us know when a shopper abandons a cart, which allows us to call and ask if we can help them by answering questions, fixing a technical glitch, or just entering the sale.
It has worked for years, and is well worth the effort for Queensboro. I would agree that these are targeted customers. After all, they had already likely uploaded their logo, placed a shirt or accessory item in the cart for embroidery, and started the checkout process.
That said, just because they are targeted doesn’t mean we should ignore them, or the return it brings to touch base with them! *smiles*
What a convoluted sign up! Are they using their service on their own site?