Tractor Supply Company sells to the rural handyman and the small farmer. Interestingly, they don’t sell tractors (online anyway). Imagine a walmart merchandized for the Midwest- but without the human food. They compete with the homedepots and petcos. Keep in mind that huge farms buy wholesale, so they wouldn’t buy bulk supplies from TSC. Most of TSC’s business is done through their B&M stores.

The Creative & Branding

The creative for Tractor Supply Company is solid; that is perfect for its brand. The space on the sides is used well- it is the side of a barn and it is light-almost white. Nice. Right away, I get that I can buy “country-living stuff”…but that is mostly because of what the word “tractor” conveys, and the slight barn feel from the side creative of the website. There are products on the site, which is good.

If I have any concern it is that the category is not completely defined for me in a 3 second glance. Can I buy hunting supplies here? Camping supplies? Maybe a tagline like “everything you need for the farm, except the land”. A better-defined, pared-down top navigation might go a long way to helping the creative and brand too. (More on this later).

The ‘know how’ section has a lot of good pics that shows off the vibe of your brand. You have to incorporate that into the site better. You could even use these as a homepage banner for a couple of days and see how it does. A manly-man picking up hay pushes your brand just as much as instructions on how to redeem your giftcards.

The primary color of TSC is red which is appropriate. I might check out other brands that are red (like target) and see how they used red on their website. You want to try to use your reds and greens judiciously, our eyes gravitate there.

Let’s take a peak at where they miss on creative…on the clothing:

Clothes Look Good on Models

This picture shows that they are somewhat inconsistent about how they display their clothing. Some clothing is on models, some isn’t. I’d imagine that the ones that are are vendor shots. Here is a good rule of thumb for people selling clothing: Always show your clothing on models. It looks better, the quality looks better, and it converts better.

Secondly, when TSC uses a model, they make the creative decision to cut off her face. Presumably this is to show more of the product in the pic or so that the customer can concentrate on the product not the model. This is the wrong decision. It is distracting. Test it…

Several years ago a competitor of mine used this same logic-they photoshopped the heads off all the models. Well, one day they must have hired a new creative director and they reshot every pic on their site to include the model’s faces. They gained marketshare. Will this always work? I am not certain, but I would test it.

The Navigation

I don’t think “horse” should be a primary category on any site unless you are selling live animals. I could see “Pets & Livestock” or an “animals” section. I might make my nav- Hardware, Lawn/Garden, Animal supplies, Clothing, Vehicles & Parts.   Then everything would be a subsection of those…I think you could fit almost everything into one of those things and it would make it much quicker to find on the site. Now I can quickly know, “do they sell guns”? No. “Do they sell tents?” No.

Multichannel

The site is adaptive, but not responsive. For a multichannel retailer I would use both. At the top of the homepage you can see it tells me where my closest store is. It also looks like they are just testing out “free ship to store” or in-store fulfillment. I am not sure I would test that during q4 but whatever.

Here is a pic of the category page:

The biggest problem I have with this display is that both online and in store welders are in the default view. Online-only should be the default and “all” should be the alternative. I would also set rules so that when all is selected, online always appears first. Get the bosses to agree then set the attributes correctly.

The only reason you need these additional attributes is for in-store fulfillment, and I am certain the customer doesn’t need to see those 5 options (just online and all inventory). On the backend I am not even sure you need these attributes to fulfill orders at the store anyways (if this is what we are going for here).

The Product Page

See the alternate pics that are available to view? These are fun, and they do not cost a lot extra to produce. The vendor shots that come with the staged families are great, but for your other products just shoot two different angles so I can get a better feel for the product. Most of the products don’t have them.

Again, like The Vitamin Shoppe, TSC has an active community that likes to talk about their products…you need to have the default view display these reviews. (At least on the desktop…hide them on mobile devices if you must).

You also have the product manual on this page…that’s a cool feature that is kind of hard to find.

There is another cool thing that is going on here, but it feels like it is still in test phase…you can click the “check store availability”:

This didn’t appear to perform any calculation…either that or their erp system is lightning fast. I am not certain whether it is saying “Yes we carry these here” or “Yes these are currently in stock at this moment”. If it is checking inventory, you could automatically check the inventory of the customers cart with your local store and offer them options like at checkout:

• Want to pick it up at the store today for free? (if everything is in inventory at the local store)
• Want to pick it up at the store in 5 days for free? (if you need to ship stuff to local store)
• Just ship it to me now and ill pay.

That would be cool!

Conclusion:

There is a lot going right. I think we could help the branding on the site by pushing the manly men pics and also tightening up the nav. Let people know instantly that they are in the right spot. Also, spend a little money for models and extra angles of product photos.

I am not certain what their multichannel capabilities are, but given the hints in the website, I have provided a couple applications to make it smoother for the customer. Make sure the customer experience on the web is solid then worry about them getting to the store. Either is hard to do well.

Also, celebrate and feature your customer reviews. They differentiate you from competitors and that helps conversions and increases engagement.

Two last tangential notes: It appears it is trying to install Silverlight and/or use an adobe plugin my cart. I am not sure why, just tell me what it is for. (I also would have another question- why not sell guns and camping gear? But this is a true question, not a suggestion based on any data…I would need to see analytics to see if your customers want that).

To contact me: eric(dot)zwickler(at)gmail(dotcom)

The Vitamin Shoppe is a multi-channel retailer that sells vitamins and supplements. They have a brick and mortar and an ecommerce presence. I’ll only be talking about their website, but the effects the website have on the B&M are important.

Again, standard disclaimer-this writeup probably sounds more negative than positive, it isn’t meant to. This isn’t a SWOT analysis, it is the “how I’d improve my favorite stores” series. Also, all comments are based on desktop, because, well, this analysis has to end sometime.

Brand

There are a ton of vitamin companies. Since the B&M came first…before the web, lets try to get a feel for what the brand is about by taking a look at the aesthetic of their stores. This might be a good place to start. Here is their logo above. (I believe this is their most current one).

Simple, classy. I notice the distinct looking “V” and the spelling of “shoppe”. I also note the blue and orange.

Let’s take a peak inside a store:

I am not a visual merchandiser, but I certainly note the blue and orange. The pics on the wall are of healthy, happy people and the “V”. Note, not all vitamin companies go for the “healthy, happy people” vibe. Beachbody.com and bodybuilding.com go for “ripped and hot…and healthy”. Note the two big sections on the wall mentioning “Vitamins and Supplements” and “Herbs and Homeopathy”. And of course, they carry tightly displayed vitamins. I don’t see any sales mentioned.

So I think we have some idea of the branding. At the very least it is orange and blue, healthy happy people are important, and the products they sell are vitamins, supplements and herbs”. I would recognize another Vitamin Shoppe if I saw it. If I were a vitamin shopper, I’d know this was a reputable brand if I walked past it in the mall and I’d go shop.

The Website:

I see the logo in the top left. Good. But I don’t see any other instances of those oranges or blues. (The links don’t count…I don’t think they are the same color blue). On the sides of the website, that is not tire tread or walkway tread, it is a series of “V”s. But not The Vitamin Shoppe V’s. It is clever but it misses. Not because you can’t instantly tell what it is. These “easter eggs” can be fun. The reason it is a miss is because I feel the vibe is “urban” or “trucker” rather than happy and healthy. Also, it should incorporate orange and/or blue.

The Creative

The creative is busy. I mentioned in my review of party city that the creative was too busy. That is a stylistic choice that their brand has chosen. I questioned whether toning it down a bit would lead to higher conversions. In this case, The Vitamin Shoppe’s brand is “simple and classy” were the words I went with.

In the next pic we come closer to the vitamin shoppe vibe. Notice what the only difference is. There is orange in the banner and it is less busy (but still busy):

A couple notes on the creative. Our eyes go to red use it once on something important. One more note on the creative. I have found that creative gets worse the more people that get involved. It is usually the creative and the acquisition people have conflicting performance incentives or instructions. While I am an acquisition guy first, I have found that nothing makes my life easier than a nice looking site. So I tend to be a mostly silent advocate of the creative team.

The Navigation

I don’t have the aid of analytics but I am pretty certain what the nav should look like. Vitamins, Supplements, Herbs and Food should be the four primary categories. (I am assuming that supplements are different than vitamins?) Those four categories should be bold and on the left. It appears people must search by brand and health concern.

Those are two great categories, but they still need to be to the right of those other categories. It just makes sense. I’d need more space to prove why, if this is not apparent. I like weight being in the top nav since I imagine most people are here for that reason, but I would try to limit the others. Make it a feature on the homepage.

The SEO & The Category Page

The technical SEO is a strength of the site. In one sense that is fantastic because you get free traffic, but sometimes your seo is so good that you don’t want to touch your site for fear that Google will wipe out your work. Free money really is that good!

One aspect of the SEO is puzzling. The lack of the use of the words ‘weight loss’ or ‘diet’. That has to be purposeful. Perhaps to get around child-blockers or google adwords restrictions? Hmm.

I have a feeling this (the good seo results) explains some of the decisions regarding the top navigation. You can see the benefits and the power of the top nav and how it can influence google’s rankings. Remember though, the point of making adjusting the site-including the top nav- is to improve customer experience and hopefully conversion rate.

Knowing this what would I do?

Ugh.

It would 100% depend on the analytics, and even then I am not sure the analytics could tell you everything you need to know. You would have to do a test which would involve redesigning your site and sending half your traffic to the new temporary site and seeing if the conversion rate improves well enough to justify making radical changes. Most companies can’t afford that. Or you could take a leap of faith. I don’t know if I’d do that either.

What I might start off with is removing one of the top nav sections (lets say the ‘kids and pets’) and moving it somewhere else…maybe a feature on the homepage. I’d wait three months and see what the damage is…concentrate on off-page SEO. If organic traffic remains flat, I’d pull the next section. The downside to this approach is that I do not think you’ll see a corresponding increase in conversion until the top nav is completely sorted out and pretty.

The Product Page

I think this page could be improved. It’s cluttered. But I want to draw attention to one huge missed opportunity. It turns out there is a huge community here that is participating in talking about this product and I really have to stumble upon it to notice it. I have circled it above. There have been 4 questions and 52 answers about this product! That is a big deal. Where are the comments? I want to see those and the stars when I come to the page. This should be the default view.

Conclusion

I’d like to see more orange and blue. Simple. Give the creative team the instructions “classy and simple” from now on…and fewer words. No one reads on the internet. And more pictures of healthy people. Simple.

The navigation is tough. I really think there is opportunity here but it would take a lot of study to determine how much to change it. I bet we could improve the product page with a little TLC…and money. And if your community is that big you have to show it off.

contact me at eric(dot)zwickler(at)gmail(dotcom)

Party City is a multichannel retailer that sells party goods. They have a brick and mortar and an ecommerce presence. I’ll be talking about their website. Again, standard disclaimer-this writeup probably sounds more negative than positive. This isn’t a SWOT analysis, it is the “how I’d improve my favorite stores” series. Also, all comments are based on desktop, because, well, this analysis has to end sometime.

The Creative and Site Merchandising

I think the biggest challenge for “party sites” like Party City is to find the right balance between conveying ‘fun’ while still maintaining solid design practices. For example, does anyone ever want to party this hard?:

(click all pics to zoom)

There is a physical limit to how much information I (or anyone) can process when I look at an image. I think Party City is pushing the boundaries towards “too much fun”. (Though I am a boring person)

Obviously this isn’t a technical website problem, but my stance is if I see it or it affects my web sales it is a web problem. I might want to discuss what works on the web and what doesn’t with the creative team. Is it possible I am wrong- that the extremely busy look is just what the party crown wants? Maybe. The biggest issue here is that there is a 50% off offer that I did not notice until just now, after looking at it for the 20^th time. See it there?

On the whole, the physical merchandising displays too are very busy. I understand that this is the style for this type of store but I wonder if we are still going overboard. We don’t need to show every item in a collection on the homepage. We can tease it by showing a few items and getting the customer to click through to see more. Remember, people can only buy by adding things to the cart, so lets try to move them that way.

To sum up, more blank space in all online creatives.

The Homepage

If we take a look at the homepage of any business, what do I want the customer to see? First, I want a customer to quickly know what we sell. I get that they sell party supplies. Good. Can you tell that Party City sells costumes? It seems kind of hidden there. It is not apparent to me that every party supply store would sell costumes, so we either have to point that out or create a new web business for those alone. (Or both). It is possible that this is a new throw-away category that they are testing out. But if not, I think we need to highlight it better. (more on this later)

The Navigation

What are some types of parties I might have? A birthday party, an anniversary party…okay so “Occasion” should be a category in some way. They have a “special occasions” section, but birthdays are not under that section. I think birthday is a really big occasion. So they tried to make it its own category. Your primary nav is not the place to do this. Your primary nav must be functional by categories. It appears that they may have separated things out how they do in the physical store (I am guessing).

Continuing on, theme is another way I might want to look for supplies. Gender might be another. Or gender can be an attribute we use to sort once they get to the category page. (Or is gender a theme?)

So I think we could narrow down the nav to “Search by Occasion”, “Search by Theme”, Costumes & Supplies. Once they click on search by occasion, then I’d show them all the options like birthdays and weddings. I just discovered they sell candy too. That should be one of the top tabs. One tab should be “candy”. One could argue that it is a party supply and put it under there, but that is not what we want. When people arrive on the homepage we want them to know we sell candy-it is a pretty big category. Thus it belongs in the top nav.

Party Supplies, Costumes, Candy are the three primary categories I would go with as well as two supplemental “search by occasion” and “search by theme”..and maybe sales. See? It is tough to keep the number of categories low. Each of these would have many subcategories.

Category Pages:

It is easy to miss what is happening here. Maybe that means whatever party city is doing it working?! First I want to draw a quick distinction. I call the category page the (usually) dynamic page that lists your products. It is sortable and filterable. You should recognize it. Here is Zappos‘:

This is different than what I call a “category landing page”. These are not sortable and usually maintained similar to how you manage your homepage. You’ll recognize it. (Some companies call them the “category page” and the “subcategory page” respectively. I don’t think there is universal agreement on this point. Whatever.) Here is REI.com:

Some companies ignore the category landing page- usually smaller companies due to time constraints- but I have never seen a company not use a category page. Party City does sometimes. For some of their party supplies they use solely a category landing page categorization while for their costumes they use a traditional category page.

Is this a next-level marketing technique? Probably not. While I do think that the traditional category page will continue to evolve, I am not certain this is the best choice. It was probably made because they believe their items are not easily categorizable (I am guessing). But everything is categorizable. For example, I may want to search to see what Hershey’s Candy they sell, or what red licorice they have. You can’t make a category for everything. That is what the traditional, sort-able category page is good for.

Using the Site: UI/UX

Say I want to look at all their balloons:

I click under party supplies>balloons and arrive at a category landing page above. So far so good. I don’t see an option for all balloons (that’s fine…some companies do that) so I’ll click on the first link because I just want to get to some balloons. So I click on girls birthday balloons:

Hmm…another landing page. Okay, not my favorite way to go but some of the companies I admire most seem to put you in an endless maze of landing pages sometimes (zappos, victorias secret) so Ill go with it. I’ll click on the Frozen Balloons banner because I want to buy some balloons:

Hmm…another landing page. One more time? I’ll click on those cute purple balloons:

The Product Page

Not what I was expecting, but I have seen companies I admire use this quick view default as their product page setup (lane Bryant did this at one time though you had to add to cart from a traditional category page, if I remember correctly). Usually this “quick view” option is not the default on desktop computers. I would only use this after a lot of testing. Even if it converted better I’d still tell my analysts to run the tests again just to be sure.

Conclusion

So, I think the big problem is the categorization. People can’t buy if they can’t get to the product page. Also, we want to reduce the number of categories in the top nav so that we can quickly communicate to the viewer that we sell candy and costumes.

Usually we want to reduce the amount of steps to get to the cart. We also want to utilize the category page more often than the category landing page. I’d default to the traditional product page, but I could be convinced otherwise. I would also explore toning down the creative but we could hammer this out in an A/B testing environment since I am least certain about this conclusion and it can be easily tested. Perhaps a happy medium could be reached.

To comment contact me at eric(dot)zwickler(at)gmail(dotcom)

Zoro Tools Homepage (Click all pics to zoom)

The Branding
The fox is a good branding tool. Kind of like the Travelocity gnome. I would like to see a universal look for the fox. That might require hiring 1 designer to do all the “fox-art”, or spending some time making a cool logo with the fox peeking out behind the letter “O”. Then just have the fox in the logo.

The current logo could be improved by making all of the letters some sort of tool…not just the two “O”s. Like ladders and a hammer? A designer would love this assignment.

The Creative
On the whole, the creative on the site does not match the intended audience. On the homepage the sections (or aisles in a hardware store) are represented by cartoon art. I am not certain if that is meant to be a differentiator or a placeholder. I would go with real photos of tools when possible rather than drawings for this company.

The creative for the promotions is great if the target audience was my grandmother. She loves snowmen! The problem is that men shop here. Not just any men…masculine men- men who use tools. These men don’t like frilly and hippy things- they like metal, tools, cars, sports and women. The vibe of the site should be more like that (though I’d leave off the women). The site needs to look sleek, not hokey. And the homepage needs pictures of tools on it!

Navigation
Let’s talk about the navigation, because I think it is a miss. There are two ways to go with navigation. One is to try to simplify everything for ease of use and understanding. The other is to try to artificially inflate your navigation so as to potentially improve your SEO. For a category this large (hardware) you must choose number one. We have to make sure we can simplify the navigation while retaining the seo. But how?

On the homepage, there is some seo value in the blue text links under the category. E.g., if you look under the category “gloves and safety apparel” there is a link “work gloves”… that has seo value.

The problem is that this section is a mess. There is too much information for me to parse as is. How I would solve this is to hide the blue links and only have them appear once you hover or click the “gloves and safety apparel” section.

This would free up so much room to merchandize the homepage better and I would not be so overwhelmed with options on how to find my stuff. If I wanted a safety helmet I could hover over the “gloves and safety apparel section” see and if it is in there. If not, maybe I could hover over safety equipment and the gloves section would collapse. This seems a lot cleaner.

Top Nav

The “all categories” dropdown goes for seo again. When I select it, all I see is a wall of text. Ideally, this would list the exact 16 primary categories that are listed on your homepage with a similar visual icon next to it.

A secondary flyout could popup showing the subcategories once you select the primary category you want to explore further.

The SEO links on the secondary flyout can be a little longer, but for the primary nav I would aim for trying to communicate the category in as few letters as possible.
Category Page

The category pages are mostly good. I might try to incorporate more attributes. E.g., maybe some products have an attribute like color or size. Zoro Tools carries a lot of products so that would help.

Product Page

The product page is interesting. It is very functional IF you take the time to figure out what is going on. The problem is that nobody does that. The problem that Zoro has is that some products have multiple features and sizes and you have to communicate if you carry that option and if it is in stock. This problem is hard enough to simplify for the customer, though I think they do a good job.

What I would do differently is hide the “buy in bulk” grid when someone first arrives at the page so that customers are not so overwhelmed. Have a link that says buy in bulk next to the ‘add to cart’ button and then the grid can display. Even if the majority of customers are buying things in bulk, I think this is the way to go. Again, this is a lot of information to process. Here is how it would look “hidden”:

Better?

Conclusion:
Great store, but everything can improve. Also, most of these ideas can be safely tested. To comment, email me at eric (dot) zwickler (at sign) gmail (dotcom).

1) Is there a hot product that you haven’t noticed because you’re too busy trying to run your business?
Did you not know that people were already selling model X-2011 already?
Competitive Intelligence can help fill that gap: Order model X-2011

2) Do you sell a great product but people refer to it by another name?
Are you selling “horses” and calling them “mounts”?
No one will find you; no one searches for ‘mounts’ when they are looking for a ‘horse’.
Competitive Intelligence can help you with that: Change your copy.

3) Is there an area you have not explored that your competitors have?
Are you only selling gold jewelry and your competitors thought to sell beaded jewelry? Your customers would never buy that!
They are already buying it. From your competitor! Perhaps you should stock it.

There are endless examples.
Competitive analysis can help you fill the holes in your research and get a leg up on the competition. Don’t reinvent the wheel- learn from others.

While it is easier to stick all keywords into one ad it is not cost effective. Your ROI will be lower because you will pay more per click than a person who segments their ads. High quality ads are rewarded with lower costs per click.

Each of the Big three pay per click companies (MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Google Adwords) use quality score as a way to reduce your cost per click. Most second-tier search engines use quality score as well.

Creating PPC Campaigns
Sometimes it can be hard to think of a logical way to create adgroups, especially for those new to PPC or for agencies that are working with a company for the first time. Here is one technique that I use that is very helpful:

Imagine that you have a client or you are a company with thousands of SKUs, across several verticals, like Bestbuy.com. If I was asked to start their campaign from scratch, it seems like a very daunting task. So where would I begin? I would look at their websites’ navigation.

Selecting and Ordering PPC Campaigns
Just like PPC advertising, one of the aspects of good website design is grouping products into a logical order. Taking a look at the top-level navigation shows us the categories that the company uses to separate their products.

I would start by creating a separate campaign for each of the top level categories. TV & Video would be 1 campaign, “Audio” would be another campaign, etc. (The TV AND Video is a hint that these might be two individual categories as well. So I would create one campaign for TV and one for Video.)

Think of campaigns like the departments in the store. If the campaigns are the departments then adgroups are the rows. Keywords are the products.

Selecting and Ordering Adgroups
I want to select adgroups that are quite narrow so as to keep a high quality score. How narrow? For a large store like Bestbuy this can be a little tricky. The adgroups will consist of groupings that are smaller than campaigns but larger than keywords. Where can I find information on a big site like this?

Once again we are helped out by the fact that Bestbuy is a well-designed site.

Take a close look at the “breadcrumbs”:

The furthest down on the navigation level will always (usually?) be the product (or service to buy or product to download, etc). The trail of breadcrumbs shows the path we used to get from the category which is the most general group to the product. The levels in between the product and the category are good candidates for adgroups.

If a site doesn’t have breadcrumbs you might be able to use a similar “trick” by looking at the product URL. A site that does this well is Calloway Golf. Here is the URL for product called an “X tour Wedge”; a type of gold club:

http://www.callawaygolf.com/Global/en-US/Products/Clubs/Wedges/X-TourWedges.html

Keyword: X tour wedge
Adgroup: Wedges
Campaign: clubs

Keywords
If you have used the method I have described, this is the easy part. By that I mean, you will now know where to put those keywords you have been wanting to bid on!

In summary, these are not necessarily the recommendations I would recommend to Calloway or BestBuy, but this provides a useful starting point for tackling a large project. Using a websites’ navigation, breadcrumbs and URL are great tools to help create your PPC campaigns achieve high quality scores.