E-commerce operators understand the value of social media for driving traffic to their online stores, but discovering which platform -- Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and so on -- brings the best ROI in terms of paying customers remains a challenge.
Derek Gaskins, president of Aleva Stores, an online retailer specializing in health-oriented products, thinks he’s found the answer. Aleva Stores uses an analytics tool called AddShoppers that has just emerged from beta testing. The tool lets e-commerce operators measure which social media platform is driving the most sales for them, according to a company release.
“AddShoppers gives us the ability to quantify, in real dollars, our C2C [consumer to consumer] business,” Gaskin told us in an email interview. “It’s great to include share buttons on a site, but it’s even better when those buttons can actually track the share and subsequent sale/revenue.”
The tool, in other words, lets e-commerce operators determine, not only which social media sites deliver the most traffic, but also which ones bring in the highest-paying customers. It also shows how much customers from each social media site spend on their products.
The tool offers purchasing demographics, as well, including from which social media sites buyers arrive at their stores. From the demographics, for example, an online retailer might learn that female Twitter users between the ages of 25 and 35 bought more of one product while male Facebook shoppers between the ages of 55 and 65 bought more of another.
AddShoppers also offers options to promote social sharing through “likes,” tweets, etc., increasing social media engagement by an average of 30 percent on sites where the incentive has been used, the company claims. Specifically, the tool lets retailers offer discount coupons displayed next to sharing buttons for the desired social media platform.
AddShoppers takes approximately five minutes to install, using a few snippets of JavaScript, the company says. It's available at no cost.
The application integrates into some popular e-commerce software packages including Magento, Shopify, Volusion, Yahoo Stores, and BigCommerce, and also is powered by Klout so retailers can identify their most “influential” sharers. In addition, AddShoppers works with other sharing platforms like Wishpot, Kaboodle, and StumbleUpon, and Gaskins said he believes more flexibility is on the way.
For Alevo Stores, AddShoppers results have impressed Gaskin enough that he said he plans to roll out the application to an additional nine sites he operates, as time permits.
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