An e-commerce company that I personally shop at is ASOS.com. ASOS is a British, online retailer who focuses on men and women’s clothing and accessories for Millennial and Gen Z consumers. The company sells “over 80,000 branded and own-brand products through localised mobile and web experiences, delivering from our fulfillment centres in the UK, US, Europe and China to almost every country in the world” (ASOS, 2017). The company “attracts 18.5 million unique visitors per month and has customers in 191 countries” (Lane, 2012).
ASOS has made a name for itself in the industry as a leader for the analytics and SEO that they execute on their website. In fact, in 2011, the company “revealed that its use of customer web analytics helped drive a 142 percent growth in sales” (Nguyen, 2011). According to David Williams, head of customer intelligence at ASOS, “As we grow internationally, it becomes crucial to have relevant and easily accessible KPIs at our teams’ fingertips, enabling them to make the right decisions on marketing campaigns, website enhancements and of course content” (Nguyen, 2011).
By tapping into visitor-level and sub-visit-level data, the company is able to really delve into what their customers are experiencing, not only on their website, but their app. “At ASOS, the customer experience is central to everything we do. Understanding how customers engage with our websites -- a crucial part of the overall customer journey -- is key to improving that experience” (Lane, 2012).
Another added layer of analyzing the customer journey involves taking real time data to give the customer a more personalized experience and to give them the best service at a moment’s notice. "The rise of ecommerce and increasing efficiency of supply chains, and the fact that retailers are in a market that moves every day, means real-time data gives them a lot of opportunity to trade effectively” (Thomson, 2014). Dealing in real-time data, though, can pose a risk for the company. “All the risk carried by a brand is around having the right product at the right price at the right time" (Thomson, 2014). The use of this real-time data, though, helped the etailer increase sales by 33% in 2013.
With so many products and with so much data, what tools does ASOS use? The first tool that the company uses is Webtrends. This website optimization software helps drive conversions, gives detailed analytics reports, and allows for multivariate testing. As a supplement to Webtrends, they use Visitor Data Mart to warehouse the immense amount of data that they receive. “ASOS uses Webtrends Analytics and Visitor Data Mart to analyse the interaction with each of its country-specific websites, and to identify the best converting traffic sources and campaigns” (Nguyen, 2011).
In 2012, ASOS selected Quantivo, a cloud-optimized, behavioral-analytics solution to analyze data from online-shopping to discover patterns that will support continuous improvements for their customers” (Lane, 2012). The company emphasized needing a tool that would complement their existing solutions and to move their analytics to the next level. However, it still needed to be simple for their team. “At the same time, we wanted a tool that was fully managed, easy to onboard and had the horsepower to deliver answers to complex queries over very large datasets in minutes or seconds” (Lane, 2012).
In the end, all data pulled from these tools and solutions are being collected to make their customer’s experience more satisfying. “The decisions such software can help with include when to discount products and by how much. It can also help with ranging decisions and picking the products shoppers want. Additionally, it can assist with pricing decisions and deciding how to price good, better and best ranges” (Thomson, 2014).
With the company being so innovative with collecting and analyzing their website data, it leads one to question how they are doing from an SEO standpoint. For a large e-commerce retailer like ASOS, getting SEO right can be a challenge. “For sites with large numbers of SKUs, and different teams working in different areas, there is a challenge in implementing good SEO” (Charlton, 2013).
Luckily for ASOS, they do really well in this department.. The meta information was descriptive and held several highly competitive keywords that would allow them to top the search engines. They used H1 tags that were not too generic and added additional read copy that allowed search engine crawls. In addition, the company does great at internal linking of its own pages, which would lead a customer to explore their other products.
According to Ruth Attwood, 4Ps Marketing SEO Manager, ASOS has gotten the basics of SEO correct and are well on their way to advanced optimization. “By getting the foundations of their onsite optimization right ASOS has been able to progress more swiftly onto advanced techniques. ASOS is the only of these four that makes use of rich snippet markup on products pages, for example, to allow them to further dominate organic search results” (Charlton, 2013).
With this background known and having explored the website myself, the only feedback that I would give the company would be to reconsider their homepage design. While visually stunning, there are so few words and keywords that as a new visitor, I might have a hard time knowing where to go next. There are so many links and menus to click on, but none really give a visitor a direction.
Finally, I would recommend to the company that they invest in some type of geotargeting or geolocation feature to easily recognize what country a visitor is coming from. This is a major flaw with the website. As someone who is a repeat customer, it is often frustrating to browse around the website to realize that the prices are not US Dollars or that the sizes are different metrics. I then have to manually change the country to United States. This kind of information at the beginning of a customer journey can really help ASOS to direct the customer to products that are more specific for them.
There is no wonder why ASOS is one of the fastest growing e-commerce retailers in the world. With excellent website analytics and SEO, the company has created a brand that will continue to anticipate the customer need.
REFERENCES:ASOS. 2017. About Us. Retrieved from http://us.asos.com/about/.
Charlton, G. 2013. Online department store SEO: ASOS gets the onsite basics right. Econsultancy. Retrieved from https://econsultancy.com/blog/63036-online-department-store-seo-asos-gets-the-onsite-basics-right.
Lane, T. 2012. Quantivo's Cloud-Optimized Analytics Solution Selected by ASOS to Drive More Value From Data. [Press Release] Market Wired. Retrieved from http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/quantivos-cloud-optimized-analytics-solution-selected-asos-drive-more-value-from-data-1657294.htm.
Nguyen, A. 2011. ASOS’ use of web analytics drives international growth. CIO. Retrieved from http://www.cio.co.uk/it-strategy/asos-use-of-web-analytics-drives-international-growth-3290544/
Thomson, R. (2014). Analysis: How asos is unlocking the value of real time data. Retail Week, N/a.
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