I wanted to initiate the blog post with very basic idea of how the original inspiration of recommendation engine based on Google Analytics data came into picture.
When I dig back to my emails, I see that there are two or three interactions that generated ideas into product. First was with Nick M during the a conference & subsequent emails. The idea was how can we use Google Analytics to automatically generate content. I will talk about later some day about Nick and the email.I am more interested in second one.
Second was when I saw what Zach Olsen did to Avinash’s & Ken Wongs’ net income framework. Zach took the framework & distilled it down to actul KPIs that an e-commerce store can use. Few of the times during the pitches to customers we had done similar excercise but I must admit that , not as good as what Avinash, Ken Wongs or Zach did. After a learning about this framework, during one of the pitch we created following diagram , which is different version of the net income approach for the e-commerce store and wondered which all areas we can influence upon.
Everyone around us, including great competitors , were focusing on improving conversion rate and which was the need for an hour. But we thought wouldn’t it be little more exciting to work on increasing the volume part of the net income. Distilling down, we could find a way finally to use Google Analytics and increase the average order value.
That way is now called Liftsuggest !
The aim is to Improve the Average order value of the transaction.
We achieve this by two simple ways.
1. Generating product recommendations during view of the product or on shopping cart.
2. We generate product bundles which has high likelihood of being bought together.
All this is achieve simply based on Google Analytics data. You dont need to collect anything, We just think that Google Analytics team has been working hard for 5 years now and what they have done is way too good !!
