Lobster.com Case Study

How LOBSTER.COM Has Used HITSLINK Before, During and After the Re-launch of a Trusted, Old Website

PART 2 :   Catch it While It’s Fresh!!!    LOBSTER.COM Re-launches onto the Web

Update:  

The new LOBSTER.COM is now live and open for business selling lobsters, clambakes, and lobster dinner gift certificates online - just in time for the 2009 holiday season.   Launching a new site into a holiday season that started off with the hottest Cyber-Monday in history with a new shopping cart hosted on new servers is not for the faint of heart.   However, with Hitslink’s real-time reports, the team at LOBSTER.COM was able to accelerate the pre-launch testing process and watch the minute-by-minute progress as the new site went live and propagated across the internet.  

Figure 1:   The new LOBSTER.COM
The new logo and mouth-watering lobsters say it all.

In this second part of the case study, we will look at some of the ways Lobster.com used HITSLINK in the launch process and how users are now interacting with the new, more extensive site.   If you missed the first part of this HITSLINK case study,  you can find it here:  LOBSTER.COM Prepares to Shed Its Old Shell

SPECIAL NOTE…. To celebrate the successful launch LOBSTER.COM is offering special holiday savings to all Net Application newsletter readers on any order placed at LOBSTER.COM.   See the conclusion of this case study for details.

Part 2:  Catch it While It’s Fresh!!!    LOBSTER.COM Re-launches onto the Web
As everyone who has ever designed or redesigned a website knows, the weeks and days leading up to a new site launch become a real pressure cooker – or boiling lobster pot if you prefer, since we are talking about LOBSTER.COM.   The sales and marketing department goes nuts about interminable delays and the IT department pushes back vigorously explaining that it is the marketing department’s constant change requests that are pushing the launch date back.  There’s truth on both sides, of course, but at some point there comes a factor, like the CEO demanding it or the holiday shopping season starting that forces the issue.  

It is exactly at that pressure point that we really came to appreciate HITSLINK’s real-time reporting.  While other analytics tools have lag times ranging from 3-24 hours, HITSLINK reports website performance within seconds.  With dozens of pre-launch checks to make before going live, HITSLINK shaved days, perhaps even weeks off the LOBSTER.COM re- launch just in time for Cyber-Monday!

Ready, Set, Launch!

Once a new site launches, of course, everyone wants to know early results.  With LOBSTER.COM, the re-launch involved moving to a new server at the same time.   While it does take up to 72 hours for DNS to propagate the new server address across the internet, at LOBSTER.COM, we were able to know instantly when the first visitors were seeing the new site.  

Using the Hitslink Latest Page Views Report, which shows a listing of pages as they are visited, we could observe the precise moment a new site page was being viewed:

 
Figure 2:   Latest Page Views shows the precise
second when visitors started seeing the new site pages.

How is the Site Working?
Once LOBSTER.COM knew the site was live and people are actually going through it, they wanted to know how visitors were interacting with it.  Even before the first order was in the shopping cart, we were all wondering the same things:

1. Are all the pages working correctly?
2. Are visitors checking out all the new offerings, like Chowder, Bisque, Mussels and Clams?
3. How well are they navigating the site? 
4. Did they like it?  Were they sticking around? 
5. How are visitors moving around the new site?

Are Pages Working Correctly
One measures of a visitors’ experience on the site is how many 404 error pages they encounter, and what pages are causing reloads.   Our page view reports showed no 404’s so that was good.   Reloads were a different matter.   A reload is the number of time a user hits reload or refresh and can indicate problems with that page.  We took a look at the HITSLINK RELOAD report and it showed the following:

Figure3:   RELOADS Report
One of several Hitslink Reports to pinpoint potentially problematic pages.

We noticed two problems in this report.  The first was a page that did not really exist on our page, the urlrewrite.asp page, which is a server-level correction.   We investigated that problem and discovered it was a temporary problem during the DNS propagation and that it would correct itself as the propagation completed.   The second, more interesting issue is the high percentage of reload on the default page.   With this report, it became clear that the IT department needed to dig into the issue, which they did and resolved in short order by correcting some scripting issues not discovered before the launch.

Are Visitors Engaged by the Site?
One simple measure of whether users are engaged with the site is how many pages they view.   By itself it is not an indicator of user engagement, since more page views may indicate users are having a hard time finding content.   On LOBSTER.COM, however, there are not many levels and categories of products to search for.  Almost all the product offerings are clear and present on the Home Page.

So, in this case, we just wanted a quick, overall impression of how the site was engaging users.   We took a look at the PAGE VIEWS report and it showed the following:

Figure 4:   The Average Page Views Per Visitor
report is a useful metric for gauging user engagement

Clearly, visitors were taking a good long look at the site and visiting many pages.   The folks at LOBSTER.COM took that as a good sign and the next logical question became,  how are users navigating the site – what paths are they following?  

Understanding How Visitors Are Navigating LOBSTER.COM
HITSLINK may be unique in that you can examine individual user sessions and see page-by-page navigation.   This allows a website designer to understand when users are moving through the site logically and when they are jumping around randomly, and not achieving their purpose for visiting the site, which LOBSTER.COM hopes is to buy a nice lobster clambake and some chowder for one of their loved ones.

HITSLINK has a powerful set of tools and reports that all a website owner to understand user behavior on the site.  In this part of the LOBSTER.COM Case Study, we will look at just 2 of those reports, and look at some of the more advanced ones in the next two case study installments.

The “Looking Over Your Shoulder” Report
HITSLINK actually calls it the Visitor Navigation Path Detail.    It shows you the second by second actions for any particular user session.   The session below lasted 6 minutes.  The visitor started at the home page, moved to the live lobsters page, and then right to the shopping cart.  After a few other page visits, they decided what wanted, checked out, and completed the order.  

Figure5:   The Visitor Navigation Path Detail Report
shows a playback of individual user sessions.

In this case, we can see the result of a successful visit from a visitor who came in on a search query on Bing as shown in Figure 6 below.   The search term indicated highly relevant buyer intent and clearly they found what they were looking for on LOBSTER.COM. 

Figure 6:   Visitor Information shows the search query
that brought this user to the site.

This sort of “session playback report” is really just like looking over someone’s shoulder as they are working with the site.   A walk-through of a few  users visits, successful and unsuccessful, has really helped our understanding of user behavior and has led us to develop ideas for navigation and site improvements at LOBSTER.

Another powerful usability report is the HITSLINK Navigation Report that shows the aggregated total of how users tend get from one page to another on your website. Combining this average of all visitors with the individual session reports is a powerful advantage and extremely cost-effective way to get do usability research on your own site  - in real time! 

Figure 7:   One section of the Navigation Paths Report for Individual Pages shows  where Visitors go after seeing the shopping cart page.

Like the other two usability reports, this can confirm the larger, more site universal trends for page navigation.   At LOBSTER.COM the most interesting indicator of this page is the strong tendency for shoppers for move towards simple, one-page checkouts.   

Part 2  Wrap up  and Special Offer from LOBSTER.COM
In this part of the case history, we’ve shown some of the HITSLINK Reports that have helped in the imminent launch and post-launch phases of the LOBSTER.COM re-launch. 

To see Part 1:  LOBSTER.COM Prepares to Shed Its Old Shell

Coming Next:   

Part 3:  “Dear Santa, Send Claws.”
Measuring Holiday Web Commerce Traffic and Email Campaigns with HITSLINK
In the next episode, we’ll present the freshest data from the brand new re-launch of LOBSTER.COM.    We will focus on how HITSLINK, the only real-time analytics platform on the market today, enables you to make up-to-the minute adjustments to your marketing programs – especially Important as you navigate the current holiday season.  

Special Offer from LOBSTER.COM   

Speaking of claws, visit LOBSTER.COM and save 10% on any LOBSTER.COM order.  Send someone you love a succulent Maine Lobster dinner (or gift card) this season.  

Discount Code:  hitslink
Special Offer expires on New Year’s Day, one per customer please.  

About the Author:

Matt Van Wagner is a seasoned sales and marketing professional specializing in paid and local search engine marketing strategies in the United States and Canada. An award-winning speaker whose presentations are usually as entertaining as they are informative, Matt has been a popular speaker at SES, SMX and other search conferences. Matt is President and founder of Find Me Faster a search engine marketing firm based in Nashua, NH. He is a member of SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England), and SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization as a member and contributing courseware developer for the SEMPO Institute. Matt writes occasionally on internet, search engines and technology topics for IMedia, The NH Business Review and other publications and served as technical editor for Andrew Goodman's "Winning Results with Google AdWords" and Mona Elesseily's "Yahoo! Search Marketing Handbook." Matt is a graduate of St Lawrence University, Canton NY (BS Economics) with an M.B.A. from Rivier College, Nashua, NH.

Matt Van Wagner
Find Me Faster
Lobster

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Australian and Canadian authorities have given the all clear to the proposed Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal.

Here’s what the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had to say about the deal:

“Microsoft and Yahoo!’s share of online paid search advertising queries in Australia was limited, In combining search engine platforms, Microsoft and Yahoo! may have been able to achieve the necessary scale to provide effective and sustainable competition to Google, which had a very large share of online paid search advertising queries.”

Google holds a huge majority in Australia with over 93.57% usage market share (per netmarketshare.com) of Australians using Google.com or Google.com.au. This dominance would have made it easier for Australian regulators to approve the partnership because Bing and Yahoo! hold such a minor market share individually.

While this marks a good milestone in the agreement, the biggest roadblock still lies ahead with European and American regulators. These are considered to be more competitive search markets, with anti-trust bodies likely to give Microsoft and Yahoo! a harder time.

In a joint statement, Yahoo/Microsoft said that they remain hopeful that an agreement will close in early 2010.

About the author:

Matt Elshaw is a marketing professional at ineedhits.com, an international search marketing firm. Matt's passion for online marketing began at university and has proved invaluable in steering product development and marketing initiatives at the company. Matt is a regular contributor to the ineedhits search marketing blog.

Matthew Elshaw
Product Marketing & Development Executive
ineedhits
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Linkedin:  ineedhits
Twitter:  @ineedhits

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