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There are many ways that big data can help you optimize sales. Today we will discuss data drill downs, or the narrowing in to more detailed information by focusing on a specific topic. In particular, using data drill downs to increase your sales.

When used correctly, data drill downs can aid your marketing campaigns immensely by helping you focus in on the who, what, and where your products will sell best. Most of you use email marketing for your e-commerce sites, which is exactly what these six drill downs optimize. The following specifications are most useful for understanding the performance of e-commerce products in terms of sales, quantity, average order value, and unique purchases:

1. Top Selling Locations

If you sell worldwide, start your analysis at the country level. The point of this exercise is to find out in which locations you are generating the maximum sales, so you can direct tailored marketing efforts at those sites. Obviously your budget is not infinite, so it makes sense to find out where your items are already doing well, and increase that success.

Target around 5-10 cities in total at the international level, but remember that advertising at this level is expensive. Cost per acquisition tends to be especially high, so do your homework and find the top locales before you move on to a deeper products analysis. Find the states that are the best sellers, and the cities within those states: in California, you might see Los Angeles is the highest selling location, so you can disregard marketing to other CA cities.

2. Top Product Categories

Once you have found the top selling locations, now find the top selling products. You probably have dozens or hundreds of categories on your website, but not every category will earn equal sales. Apply the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your profits come from 20 percent of your product categories.

Look within those top 5-10 cities, and, using your analytics tools, note which product categories in each city are your biggest sellers. There is no point trying to market categories that do not sell already!

3. Top Selling Products

Once you have those categories, the next data drill down is to find the top products in each category. As before, you probably have dozens or hundreds of products in each category – but only some earn the greatest sales. Again, the 80/20 rule comes into play: 80 percent of profits come from 20 percent of products. When you find the top sellers, promote those within the appropriate markets.

4. Top Performing Traffic Sources

As before: you have your top selling products in each category. Now you need to find what traffic source is responsible for its sales. Look within each city’s top products, and see the origins of your customers. For example, if you see that the top traffic source is Google and the medium is organic, you know that you can improve the performance of your product by improving the organic search – i.e. your SEO. You can also stop promoting via PPC or Facebook ads if those are not the top sources.

The main point of this exercise is to focus on the mediums that are working to bring you customers, and stop spending time and money on the marketing campaigns that are not helping.

5. Top Landing Pages for Conversion Funnel Analysis

When you find your top traffic sources for best selling products, next find the top landing pages. That way you can optimize them to further improve sales, using funnel analysis.

Basically, take the top landing pages, and then analyze them using a funnel to see where the conversions take place – and where you have a drop off. When you find that drop, segment this funnel by applying all of these 14 advanced segments for conversion funnel analysis:

  • All traffic
  • Organic search traffic
  • Paid search traffic
  • Direct traffic
  • Referral traffic
  • Email traffic
  • Mobile traffic
  • Tablet and desktop traffic
  • New users
  • Returning users
  • Branded search traffic
  • Non-branded search traffic
  • Social media traffic
  • Performed site search

Once you know the reason for the drop off from one step to the next, and the page(s) to be optimized, you can move on to the A/B tests.

6. Top Performing Keywords

This is particularly useful if you run search marketing campaigns (paid or organic). Targeting top keywords will improve the sales of your best selling products even further!

In conclusion, drill downs can be particularly useful if you want to improve sales, but do not know where to start, or do not have the budget to throw together a large marketing campaign. Use these drill downs to narrow in on what is working where, and optimizing your campaigns and landing pages appropriately. Within a very short time, and with very little other work, you can boost your already best selling product sales even higher.