Matt Clarke

I'm an e-commerce director with a keen interest in web analytics and development. I am a former editor-in-chief of specialist print and digital titles at Bauer Media and am currently on the Econsultancy MSc in Internet Retailing.

Monitoring purchase latency in Google Analytics

Understanding purchase latency, the number of days between purchase events, is essential to any customer retention strategy.

If you know how typical customers behave you can identify those who are likely to defect when they don't purchase again within the average latency period, using so-called trip wire events.

If you can re-engage customers before they defect, you'll retain them longer and your revenues will rise.

by Matt Clarke 09 August 2011 10:33am 2 comments

25 e-commerce mega menus dissected

Mega menus have been applauded by gurus such as Jakob Nielsen for their ease of use, so it's little surprise that they've become the menu of choice for a growing proportion of e-commerce retailers.

If you are planning on adding a mega menu to your site, want to improve your existing menu or just need some inspiration, here is a round-up of some of the things online retailers are currently doing with their horizontal navigation.

by Matt Clarke 04 July 2011 11:07am 25 comments

How to boost sales and grow profits with voucher codes

Voucher codes have rapidly grown in popularity over the past few years. There have been a raft of sites launched to allow people to share codes and it seems that many e-commerce sites are offering them as part of their digital strategy.

by Matt Clarke 27 April 2011 10:55am 10 comments

How to use Google Analytics to find the best time to send emails

In my experience, the day of the week and hour of the day at which marketing emails are sent is often based on little more than the gut feeling of the email marketer and the performance of previous emails, rather than real data.

As someone who could put the anal in analytics, I think that's a rather inexact science. Surely there's a more accurate way to figure out whether the assumption is really true?

by Matt Clarke 19 April 2011 11:59am 24 comments

Tracking on-site tweets and follows with Google Analytics

Chris Lake's earlier post How Econsultancy measures Twitter via Google Analytics gave some great insight into how Econsultancy was already tracking Twitter, and what trends it was observing.

However, inward traffic is only part of the picture, and with some additional tweaks it's possible to get a shedload of additional data on Twitter usage which could be used to further improve social media performance.

by Matt Clarke 22 March 2011 12:35pm 11 comments