World Wide Walmart: A Look into the Industry Giant

Post Title: World Wide Walmart: A Look into the Industry Giant

Post Date: February 19, 2018

Walmart is such a fascinating company for a lot of reasons. They’re known for selling hundreds of products for an affordable price in their stores and online. The company has stepped up their e-commerce game in the past few years, recently adding free two-day shipping without a membership cost. This seems to be a defensive move against Amazon, who offers two-day shipping with their Amazon Prime memberships. (Peterson, 2017)

The Analytics

Walmart.com brings over 300 million web visitors per month, according to a Similar Web analytics report. 90% of those visits come from the United States. Interestingly enough, the majority of their traffic sources are from searches or directly to the website, with email and social both below 3%.

The highest amount of traffic comes from searches, with an overwhelming 80.87% of those being organic searches. This is a big company that has brand recognition, but their SEO has to be on the highest level to bring in the majority of their traffic organically. (Similarweb.com. 2018)

Data Capabilities

Large companies like Walmart have the capability to collect massive amounts of data on its consumers. “American multinational retail giant Walmart collects 2.5 petabytes of unstructured data from 1 million customers every hour. One petabyte is equivalent to 20 million filing cabinets; worth of text or one quadrillion bytes. The data generated by Walmart every hour is equivalent to 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress. With tons of unstructured data being generated every hour, Walmart is improving its operational efficiency by leveraging big data analytics. Walmart has created value with big data and it is no secret how Walmart became successful.” (Dezyre.com, 2015) This data helps Walmart stay on top of their market by allowing them to get a full picture of their consumer base.

How do they do it?

Walmart has literal petabytes of data that they can analyze. How did they get this information? They collect information on their consumers in a number of different ways. “Walmart tracks and targets every consumer individually. Walmart has exhaustive customer data of close to 145 million Americans of which 60% of the data is of U.S adults. Walmart gathers information on what customer’s buy, where they live and what are the products they like through in-store Wi-Fi.” (Dezyre.com, 2015) Using Wi-Fi to collect data from consumers is a great way to tie in-store shopping to the digital experience. This information can be used to see what consumers are looking for, and can also prompt consumers digitally to visit their site.

The data Walmart collects on its users allows them to segment their customers based on interests. “The analytical platforms give Walmart a lot of room for research and experimentation. Analysis can be performed on just the highest level of consumer groups, but it also enables Walmart to segment their customer base at a very granular level. We’re living in a world where marketing has to be personal to be effective, so this approach provides a lot of benefits. Walmart’s analytical platforms provide a customer layer complete with a full profile, along with drill-down functionality to retrieve the shopping history of that customer, offering even more individualized customer preference profiles.” (Woods, 2017)

This information also allows the company to determine what customers might be interested in when making future purchases. “The flexibility of analytical insights offered by Walmart’s platforms then enables them to stay competitive in the space of real-time digital ads. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping to catch a few fish, it’s like they use radar to know right where to head to find the entire school.” (Woods, 2017)

Walmart uses the data they collect to offer better products to their customers and fix errors that might come their way. “The system also provides automated alerts, so, when particular metrics fall below a set threshold in any department, the relevant team is alerted so that they can find a fast solution. In one example of this, during Halloween, sales analysts were able to see in real time that, although a particular novelty cookie was very popular in most stores, it wasn’t selling at all in two stores. The alert prompted a quick investigation, which showed that, due to a simple stocking oversight, the cookies hadn’t been put on the shelves. The store was then able to rectify the situation immediately.” (Marr, n.d.) The data provided to Walmart allows the company to make changes in real time, both in store and online. The data provided from the website can show what products are being looked for and what products might need a little more promotion. In-store data can provide similar information. Combined, the company can have a really good grasp on what their customers want.

Walmart utilizes a number of online data sources when running their analysis. “As well as 200 billion rows of transactional data (representing only the past few weeks!), the Café pulls in information from 200 sources, including meteorological data, economic data, Nielsen data, telecom data, social media data, gas prices, and local events databases. Anything within these vast and varied datasets could hold the key to the solution to a particular problem, and Walmart’s algorithms are designed to blaze through them in microseconds to come up with real-time solutions.” (Marr, n.d.) Being able to compare multiple data sources allows the company to find solutions to problems that might arise. The sheer amount of data can paint a very clear picture of any issues that the company could need to address.

While the data has been provided by a mix of in-store and online data, there is no arguing with their SEO tactics. “The results are in: Walmart’s product page views have more than doubled year over year since improving SEO tactics. A decade ago, Amazon was the trailblazer in SEO. They’ve long understood its value and the role of smart content in a powerful product page. Now Walmart.com is catching up.” (Delarmente, 20215) The company utilizes SEO on their sites to improve their organic placement online, as shown above. 42% of the online traffic for Walmart comes from searches, and 80% of that traffic is organic. The site has a pretty solid grip on their SEO tactics.

How to Improve

Walmart is obviously popular for a reason. Their website is set up in a way that garners success for them. Personally, I believe that their site is a little cluttered. There’s a lot going on when you get to the home page.

Using heatmaps on this website would be a great tool. Since there is so much information on the front page, it would be beneficial to see where people are gravitating to. If there are items that aren’t being clicked on, the company could swap those out for other items. If there are items that need to be promoted, they could see what part of the page gets the most clicks and place that item in that spot.

Another good analytical tool would be to set up a Goal Flow Report on Google Analytics. This could show Walmart where people might be having trouble in the buying process. This obviously wouldn’t work for every single product, but could help their team with bigger products like the Nintendo Switch or a new grill that they want to feature. The Goal Flow Report could let the company know what changes would need to be made to make the process smoother for their customers.

Conclusion

Walmart is a powerhouse company with a massive amount of data at their fingertips. They’re able to combine their online and in-store data to create a website that fits the needs of their consumers. With most of their traffic coming from organic search results, Walmart has proven their worth with their SEO tactics. Their web analytics help them alter their website to better improve themselves and keep up with the competition.

References

Delarmente, A. (2015). Walmart.com's Best SEO Practices Pay Off. [online] Content26.com. Available at: https://content26.com/blog/walmart-coms-seo-best-practices-pay-off/ [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018].

DeZyre. (2015). How Big Data Analysis helped increase Walmarts Sales turnover?. [online] Available at: https://www.dezyre.com/article/how-big-data-analysis-helped-increase-walmarts-sales-turnover/109 [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018].

Marr, B. (n.d.). Walmart: Big Data analytics at the world's biggest retailer. [online] Bernard Marr. Available at: https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=690 [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018].

SimilarWeb. (2018). walmart.com Traffic Statistics. [online] Available at: https://www.similarweb.com/website/walmart.com [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018].

Woods, D. (2017). Data Fusion, Data Privacy: What We Can Learn From Walmart's Flexible Data Architecture. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2017/03/31/data-fusion-data-privacy-what-we-can-learn-from-walmarts-flexible-data-architecture/2/#7d44dbf85b59 [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018].