Root Cause Diagnosis

For this blog, I will pose as a web analyst for Ford Motor Company. My boss has come to me with a problem. Marketing wants to know why people aren't requesting quotes from local dealers for the Mustang. To help my team narrow down the possible problems I will conduct a root cause diagnosis to identify all the influencing levers for why visitors may not be filling out the Request a Local Quote for the Mustang on Ford.com. In addition to visually examining the website, I will also access the website, http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/, and go through the steps to obtain a quote.

One of the influencing levers I noticed on the Ford website was where the “Request Local Quote” button was located, specifically in reference to buttons with similar purposes. Towards the top of the webpage I notice the “Pricing” link and “Build and price” button. These particular buttons are a lot easier to recognize and easy to use. Additionally, each of these options allows you to customize a car and print out a price estimate to take with you to a dealer. Another feature on the website that is more pronounced is a starting price that allows consumers to enter their zip code for a price. Consumers are more likely to access a localized quote via this option because the numbering and lettering grabs your attention and the overall location.

The second influencing lever I noticed was the icon associated with the “Request a Local Quote” button, $, the symbol for money. Consumers often notice and respond to visual cues faster than reading comprehension. In this case, consumers who are just “window-shopping” might make a subconscious decision to avoid any option that would require a cost or $. 

The third influencing lever I noticed was the information required on the part of the customer, in order to receive a quote. Customers may not want to provide information like: address, phone number, first and last name, and e-mail address in order to get pricing for a vehicle they may or may not get. Customers may fear they will be subject to telemarketing calls, junk mail, and spam messages if they provide their information. Additionally, even though the button says “local quote,” the quote that is actually given is an “Internet Price.” This may lead customers leave the site and visit their local Ford Dealer for the actual “local quote.”

Search Engine Optimization

For this particular blog, I will be using the information & techniques from the lectures and reading, to analyze my blog for search engine optimization improvements. My analysis will be given in the form of responses to the following questions:

What data did you look at?

Some of the data I examined included the following: Pages/Visit (avg.); % of New Visits; and Avg. Visit Duration

What techniques did you use?

For this particular analysis, I used Google Analytics. This free analytic tool allowed me to compare the data representing each metric and graphs the results on a variety of platforms (i.e., scatter plots, pie chart, or bar graph).

What are your findings?

My results for this analysis were as follows:

1. Avg. Pages/Visit = 4.06
2. Avg. Visit Duration = 7 min. 6 sec.
3. % of New Visits = 34.92

How would you improve the SEO of your blog?  Use the data & techniques to prove your recommendations.

In order to improve the SEO of my blog, I could link my blog to various social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. This technique would help increase the amount of “new visits” my blog would receive. Additionally I could use a variety of tags to increase the amount of “new visits” generated by keyword searches. In order to increase the number of “return visits” and “visit duration”, I could examine the comments posted on the website and adjust the content of my blogs. If the content of my blogs is more aligned with what visitors like or believe, the amount of “return visits” and “referral visits” most likely will increase.

Custom Report

For this particular blog, I had to setup a custom report using Google Analytics. Below is a screen shot of my report and an explanation for the metrics I chose.

The metrics I used for creating my custom report are: Pages/Visit, % of New Visits, and Visits with Searches. The reason I chose to focus on visits is because I wanted find out the amount of hits my Blog was receiving. The “Pages/Visits” metrics helps me to gain a better understanding of how many pages (on average) are viewed per visits. The custom report also shows me, which days during the last month had the most pages viewed per visit. I chose the “% of New Visits” because I wanted to find out how much of the traffic for my blog is new traffic. The metric “Visits with Searches” was selected to find out if any of the traffic for my blog was generated from keyword searches. I did not expect any type of results for this metric. The main purpose of the metric was to see if visitors might have come across my blog during a keyword search.

Landing Page Improvements

For the purpose of this blog, I will pose as a web analyst for Amazon. My task is to make recommendations on how to improve the landing page for “women purple boots.” Here are my suggestions:

1.) Make the selection more relevant to what is being searched for and eliminate results that do not match the three keywords.

2.) The default setting for how the results are sorted should be by “most popular”

3.) A way to narrow down the search results by the type of boot, i.e., snow, thigh highs, dress, or type of material.

4.) Provide viewers an option to narrow down the search results by shoe size.

5.) Cross-marketing for other products that may go with the boots or are “items that others viewed or purchased.”

In this particular case, the landing page displayed results that were a different color than “purple” and items that were not “boots.” Customers in search of “women purple boots,” are probably not going to want to search through “black boots” or “purple shoes” if that is not what they want.

Additionally I feel that defaulting the results to reflect the “most popular” types of boots may increase sales based off of the latest fashion trends. People are often influenced by purchase patterns of other consumers. The mentality is often: “If a particular boot is popular, there must be a good reason why so many have purchased that type.

Since customers typically do not want to waste time looking at things they do not want to buy, the landing page should provide options to refine the search by boot type. This would allow customers to find the type boot they want more quickly. In keeping with the theme of expedited shopping, “shoe size” filtering would streamline the shopping experience. By allowing the customers to refine the search by “shoe size” would allow them to see which styles are available for their specific size.

The bottom line is the easier it is for customers to find what they are looking for, the better they feel about shopping through Amazon. Furthermore, if the overall experience is quick and pleasant, customers may decide to search for other products and buy something else they did not originally intend to buy. The cross marketing of different types of products and suggested items can help increase the sales of these “unintended” purchases and can lead to repeat business.

Measuring Relationships in PR

The subject for this blog is to pick a company that has good relationships with audience and discuss them using the questions below. For this exercise I will select Kraft Foods.

Question 1: How does the organization maintain good relationships with its audience?

Kraft maintains good relations with its consumers in a number of ways. One way is through social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. These websites allow company representatives to interact with customers directly. Another way is by promoting positive messages in their marketing efforts. Maintaining a positive image in the media makes it easier for consumers to associate Kraft with positivity.

Question 2: How might it measure those efforts to maintain its relationships?

Kraft could gather information from social media outlets, discussed earlier, or by conducting surveys (online, mail-in, over the phone). Kraft could monitor the sales of its many brands. The marketing plans for the brands that are not selling can be re-evaluated to determine how to reach more consumers.

Question 3: Why is it important to measure those relationships?

It is important to measure these relationships because customer relations are crucial business success. If Kraft has a poor relationship with its audiences then sales will dwindle and so will the company. Additionally, poor relationships with customers will hurt the word-of mouth advertising.

Question 4: What is the value of those good relationships to the organization?

The value of these good relationships are: an increase sales, repeat business, and referral business.

Question 5: What might be the organization’s appropriate goals? Explain why they would be appropriate goals.

I think having good relationships with customers is one of the goals for Kraft Foods. Having  positive relationships has a great impact on the profit margins and number of sales. Good relationships are also directly connected to one of the company’s other goal, getting a larger piece of the market.

Question 6: What might be the outcomes of these successful relationships and how might they be measured?

The outcomes would be an increase in the number of sales across all of the brands operated by Kraft Foods. This could be measure by tracking the number of sales from the beginning of a promotion to just after it ends. An increase/decrease in sales would tell you if the promotion reached its target audience and if it had a positive/negative effect.

References: http://www.kraftfoodscompany.com; http://www.kraftrecipes.com