Home furnishing retailer Rooms To Go simplifies the consumer shopping experience by offering completely designed room packages. Given that the company offers variations and add-ons, it wanted to better understand its customers" purchase choices to streamline online customization options. Working with LunaMetrics to integrate Google Analytics Premium with BigQuery, Rooms To Go was able to identify the products that are often purchased together. Armed with these insights, the company has made customization on the site smarter and easier for users, which ultimately boosted sales and improved the overall shopping experience.
Goals
Understand customers’ online product choices to better tailor customization options on the Rooms To Go website
Approach
Integrated Google Analytics Premium with BigQuery
Extracted raw, visitor-level data about items purchased online
Performed statistical data mining to find products often purchased together
Results
Produced actionable insights quickly
Expanded functionality to increase sales of accessory and coordinating products and to improve user experience
Rooms To Go offers the nation’s largest furniture inventory through nearly 150 retail showrooms as well as online. Products are sold as complete room packages—an approach that makes for a simplified shopping experience. Designers coordinate each room’s colors, fabrics and accessories to the last detail so customers don’t have to.
Customization counts
The Rooms To Go and Rooms To Go Kids websites offer several variations of room packages and add-on options, allowing customers to choose just the products that meet their needs. Due to this variety, Rooms To Go wanted to better understand customers’ online purchase choices to make it easier for them to customize packages.
A new view of the data
As a Google Analytics Premium customer, Rooms To Go worked with LunaMetrics (a Google Analytics certified partner) to integrate Google Analytics Premium with BigQuery to gain understanding of customers’ online choices. Specifically, BigQuery is designed to help customers in querying massive datasets by enabling super-fast, SQL-like queries—all while using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure.
For Rooms To Go, this strategy enabled the extraction of data about items purchased in e-commerce transactions on the site, with the particular goal of discovering which products were often bought together.
“BigQuery allowed us to extract and organize large quantities of raw, visitor-level data from Google Analytics to use in this analysis,” says Jonathan Weber, data evangelist at LunaMetrics. Statistical data mining techniques were applied to the data using R, a statistical programming language.
Making add-ons easy
The analysis—made possible by the Google Analytics Premium and BigQuery integration—produced important findings for Rooms To Go about how customers often combine products in a room.
For example, the strategy has allowed Rooms To Go to find common purchase patterns among products. These insights have helped the company offer expanded functionality for customers to add accessory products (such as a nonslip rug pad with a rug) or coordinating pieces (such as extra dining chairs in a dining room) easily. By making customization smarter and easier, the company expects both increased sales of accessory and coordinating products and a better overall user experience.
Rob Crigler, VP of digital marketing at Rooms To Go, shares, “Google Analytics Premium provided a statistical data analysis that was beyond our previous limitations. The insights were quickly available and actionable.”
Moving forward, the company is confident these data-driven options will continue to work in concert with the Rooms To Go tradition of giving online customers an easy, convenient way to assemble stylish, coordinating rooms.
